FrankenPHP is a modern application server for PHP built on top of the Caddy web server.
The server works with any PHP app and makes Laravel and Symfony projects faster thanks to their official integrations with the worker mode.
FrankenPHP can also be used as a standalone Go library to embed PHP in any app using net/http.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Early Hints – natively supports the 103 Early Hints status code. Using Early Hints can improve the load time of your web pages by 30%
- Worker mode – boot your application once and keep it in memory.
- Real-time capabilities – comes with a built-in Mercure hub! Mercure allows to push events in real-time to all the connected devices: they will receive a JavaScript event instantly.
- Uses its own SAPI specially handcrafted for Go web servers. There’s no need for PHP-FPM.
- Easy deploy – cloud Native app shipped as a Docker image. Compatible with Kubernetes, and all modern cloud platforms. It’s also possible to package your PHP app as a standalone, self-executable static binary.
- Native support for HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.
- Automatic HTTPS certificates generation and renewal (Let’s Encrypt or ZeroSSL).
- Copy your PHP files in the document root, that’s all!
- Build standalone, self-executable and dependencies-free binaries for PHP web applications, and command-line tools.
- Brotli, Zstandard and Gzip compression.
- Structured logging.
- Prometheus metrics and tracing.
- Deploy apps with zero downtime thanks to graceful reloads.
- Popular PHP extensions, including OPcache and XDebug, are natively supported.
- Extensible – compatible with PHP 8.2+, most PHP extensions and all Caddy modules.
Website: frankenphp.dev
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Kévin Dunglas
License: MIT License
FrankenPHP is written in Go and C. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| PHP Application Servers | |
|---|---|
| RoadRunner | High performance PHP application server, load balancer, and process manager |
| FrankenPHP | The modern PHP app server |
| Swoole | Complete PHP async solution with built-in support for async programming |
| PPM | Process manager, supercharger and load balancer |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |

