What is Flight?

Flight is a fast, simple, extensible framework for PHP. Flight enables you to quickly and easily build RESTful web applications. Flight also has zero dependencies.

Basic Usage

First install it with Composer

composer require flightphp/core

or you can download a zip of this repo. Then you would have a basic index.php file like the following:

require 'flight/autoload.php';

Flight::route('/', function () {
    echo 'hello world!';
});

Flight::start();

Is it fast?

Yes! Flight is fast. It is one of the fastest PHP frameworks available. You can see all the benchmarks at TechEmpower

See the benchmark below with some other popular PHP frameworks. This is measured in requests processed within the same timeframe.

---
config:
  xyChart:
    showDataLabel: true
---
xychart-beta
  title "PHP Framework Performance (TechEmpower, requests/sec)"
  x-axis "Framework" ["Flight", "Yii", "Fat-Free", "Slim", "Phalcon", "Symfony", "Lumen", "Laravel", "CodeIgniter"]
  y-axis "Requests/sec (x1000)" 0 --> 200
  %% Series 1: Plaintext, Series 2: JSON
  bar [190.4, 145.7, 139.2, 89.6, 95.9, 65.1, 40.6, 26.7, 20.6]
  bar [182.5, 131.4, 134.0, 87.3, 87.7, 63.2, 39.7, 26.9, 19.9]

Skeleton App

You can also install a skeleton app. Go to flightphp/skeleton for instructions on how to get started!

Documentation

We have our own documentation website that is built with Flight (naturally). Learn more about the framework at docs.flightphp.com.

Community

Chat with us on Matrix IRC #flight-php-framework:matrix.org

Upgrading From v2

If you have a current project on v2, you should be able to upgrade to v3 with no issues depending on how your project was built. If there are any issues with upgrade, they are documented in the migrating to v3 documentation page. It is the intention of Flight to maintain longterm stability of the project and to not add rewrites with major version changes.

Requirements

[!IMPORTANT] Flight requires PHP 7.4 or greater.

[!NOTE] PHP 7.4 is supported because at the current time of writing (2024) PHP 7.4 is the default version for some LTS Linux distributions. Forcing a move to PHP 8 would cause a lot of heartburn for those users. The framework also supports PHP 8.

Roadmap

To see the current and future roadmap for the Flight Framework, visit the project roadmap

License

Flight is released under the MIT license.