TechEmpower.FrameworkBenchmarks/frameworks/PHP

PHP Frameworks

The information below contains information specific to PHP. For further guidance, review the documentation.

Infrastructure Software Versions

PHP Versions

PHP 7.3.*, PHP 5.6.* and HHVM 3.30.

Adding New PHP-based Frameworks

PHP Acceleration and Caching

Caching the output of the PHP bytecode compiler is expressly allowed by this benchmark. As we use PHP 5.5, which comes with opcache built in, we recommend you use this. However, some frameworks utilize APC instead as switching can be problematic (e.g. APC allows arbitrary data caching, while opcache).

Caching the output of parsing your configuration files is also expressly allowed (e.g. file caching, metadata caching). Some frameworks use APCu or memcached to achieve this.

Caching of the classloader (often referred to as optimizing the classloader) is also allowed. Most frameworks have their own methods of doing this.

Caching of any data fetched from the database is not allowed. Specifically, things such as Doctrine's Result Cache are inadmissible.

However, if you are using an ORM that prepares SQL statements in some way, such as how Doctrine translates DQL into SQL, this translated form can be cached, as long as you are dynamically accepting query parameters.

Caching any data using databases (Redis, MongoDB, etc) is discouraged, as 1) our databases run on a separate computer across the network, so you won't see much benefit 2) your usage of the DB may impact other framework's tests, which we cannot allow. You may launch a DB locally on the application server as part of your setup.sh scripts and utilize it for caching the allowable cache items, if you so desire, but it's normally much easier to use systems such as APCu.

Ask if you are not certain.

Install.sh and Setup.sh Files

Most PHP frameworks use fw_depends php5 nginx composer in their install.sh file, which installs PHP5, Nginx, and Composer automatically. They then create a setup.sh containing these lines (comments added to clarify what's happening). fw_depends php7 is now also available.

# Explanation of variables provided by toolset:
#   FWROOT - absolute path to framework toolset, normally 
#            something like /home/username/FrameworkBenchmarks
#   TROOT  - absolute path to this framework's folder, normally
#            something like /home/username/FrameworkBenchmarks/frameworks/PHP/cakephp
#   IROOT  - absolute path to the location where the toolset has installed software, 
#            something like /home/username/FrameworkBenchmarks/installs
#
# As of writing fw_depends installs 5.5.17 into the installer root
export PHP_HOME=${IROOT}/php-5.5.17
export PHP_FPM=$PHP_HOME/sbin/php-fpm
export NGINX_HOME=${IROOT}/nginx

# Uses the full path to php-fpm
#   - php-fpm configuration is located in the config folder found in the 
#     root of this project
#   - We tell PHP-FPM to place it's PID file into the deploy folder
$PHP_FPM --fpm-config $FWROOT/toolset/setup/linux/languages/php/php-fpm.conf -g $TROOT/deploy/php-fpm.pid
# Turn on nginx using the configuration file found in this framework's deploy
# folder
$NGINX_HOME/sbin/nginx -c $TROOT/deploy/nginx.conf

When using php, php-fpm, or other binaries, always use the full path to the binary, e.g. instead of php <command>, use /home/foo/FrameworkBenchmarks/installs/php-5.5.17/bin/php <your command>.

Dependency Management Using Composer

Many PHP apps use Composer for dependency management, which greatly simplifies downloading the framework, loading the framework, and upgrading the framework version in the future.

There are two main guidelines for PHP frameworks:

• Never include the source code for your framework into this repository. Download it using Composer, wget, or some other tool
• When using Composer, always add a composer.lock file in addition to the composer.json file. The lock file is a fully-defined file generated by composer 1) reading your JSON file 2) finding all dependencies 3) downloading a lot of data from Github. Without this lock file, composer takes 2-3x longer to run, and it can even halt and require user input

Setting up Composer

Add a composer.json file to your framework's root folder, e.g. php-fuel/composer.json. Ensure your setup.sh lists composer as a dependency.

# Note the order! Composer depends on PHP so it has to be defined after
fw_depends mysql php7 nginx composer

The composer install command will run automatically using the following flags: --no-dev --no-interaction --no-progress --no-suggest --optimize-autoloader --classmap-authoritative

After the installation completes, your framework folder will have a new vendor folder, e.g. php-fuel/vendor that contains all dependencies. Update your PHP scripts to either directly reference files inside of vendor, or use the vendor/autoload.php file.

Generating composer.lock file

Composer uses Github a lot, enough so that it is common for it to exceed the API limit and cause infinite hangs or installation failures. To avoid this, it is necessary to generate a composer.lock file. If you're lucky, you can run toolset/run-tests.py --install server --test <your framework> --install-only, which will run your install.sh file and leave the composer.lock file right next to your composer.json file. If this works, just add the lock file to the repository and you're done. There is more info on this here and here

Note: You may have to force-add the lock file (e.g. git add -f composer.lock), because some gitignore files in this repo contain *.lock to avoid Ruby's lock files.

If you are prompted for input during the run-tests.py script above, then you need to generate your lock file manually so that you may answer the input queries as they are shown. Use these steps

# Define the environment variables you need (modify as needed)
export IROOT=/home/you/FrameworkBenchmarks/installs
export TROOT=/home/you/FrameworkBenchmarks/frameworks/PHP/php-yii2

# Run the installation shown above
#
# This will manually prompt you for your Github credentials 
# to avoid the Github rate limit
# When this command completes, you will have a lock file 
${IROOT}/php-5.5.17/bin/php ${COMPOSER_HOME}/composer.phar install \
  --working-dir $TROOT

# Add the lock file to this repository
git add -f composer.lock

Updating Composer setup

If you update composer.json, you need to regenerate the lock file. If you forget to do this, you will see this error message when running:

Warning: The lock file is not up to date with the latest changes in composer.json. You may be getting outdated dependencies. Run update to update them.

Debugging PHP Frameworks

The first stop for HTTP 500 errors is to enable stack traces. Update toolset/setup/linux/languages/php/php-fpm.conf to include php_flag[display_errors] = on. If you don't use php-fpm, update the config/php.ini

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