What Is ManaPHP? A High‑Performance, Lightweight PHP Framework Powered by Swoole

What is ManaPHP

ManaPHP was created with the philosophy “popularize PHP coroutines, promote PHP development”. It uses the Swoole extension as the underlying engine and is designed for a resident‑memory environment, providing many ready‑to‑use components for console and HTTP development.

The framework aims for simplicity, allowing developers to enjoy Swoole’s high performance and new programming model with minimal learning cost.

Comparison with Traditional MVC Frameworks

ManaPHP supports three execution modes: traditional (Apache/FPM), resident‑memory, and coroutine. The latter two deliver performance advantages unattainable by classic frameworks.

Resident‑memory mode : Unlike traditional PHP frameworks, it does not require an external web server; the framework ships its own high‑performance HTTP server built on Swoole\Http\Server. Objects remain in memory between requests, reducing the overhead of repeated creation and destruction.

Coroutine mode : With coroutines enabled, a single process can handle N requests concurrently, avoiding the blocking behavior of traditional or resident‑memory modes. Only a modest amount of additional memory is needed per request, and the optimal number of processes usually matches the CPU core count, lowering context‑switch costs.

Comparison with Other Swoole‑Based Frameworks

ManaPHP is extremely lightweight, with a simple architecture and highly readable source code, making it easy to master and customize.

The development approach mirrors traditional MVC frameworks, so developers do not need to learn Swoole directly.

It bundles many out‑of‑the‑box components for rapid development.

It is currently the only framework that can run in traditional, resident‑memory, and coroutine modes without code changes, allowing gradual adoption.

It employs native Swoole coroutines together with the latest PHP Streams for one‑click coroutine conversion.

Framework Positioning

While many Swoole frameworks target large‑scale teams and massive PHP application clusters, ManaPHP focuses on small‑to‑medium enterprises and startups. It encapsulates Swoole’s capabilities in a simple API so junior and intermediate developers can build high‑concurrency systems, democratizing Swoole beyond expert users.

Core Features

Command line: packaged CLI infrastructure for rapid console program development.

HTTP: resident‑memory + coroutine + familiar MVC usage.

High performance: minimalist architecture + Swoole engine + coroutines, surpassing C‑extension frameworks such as Phalcon and Yaf.

Server: built‑in server eliminates the need for Apache or PHP‑FPM.

Coroutines: native Swoole coroutines combined with PHP Streams for one‑click coroutineization.

Connection pools: DB and Redis components use connection pools by default.

Persistent connections: long‑living connections per process for DB/Redis.

Dependency injection: lightweight IoC inspired by Phalcon and similar frameworks.

Component‑based architecture with many ready‑to‑use modules.

Middleware: easy registration for request filtering and processing.

Routing: fully regex‑based implementation, high performance, simple configuration.

View: Blade‑like templating engine with pre‑compilation, faster than native PHP.

Autoloading: Composer support for convenient third‑party library usage.

Environment Requirements

PHP >= 8.0.2

Swoole >= 4.6.7

Quick Start

Install via Composer:

composer create-project manaphp/app-api --prefer-dist

Start the server: php /var/www/html/public/index.php Test the endpoint (in a new terminal):

curl http://127.0.0.1:9501/api