PHP Lightning

Lightning aims to be a blazing fast and lightweight headless PHP Controller-Model-Service framework, implementing all of the most important features of a PHP framework without the fluff. Includes Vue/NUXT 3 and Tailwind for front-end development, and a headless GraphQL-based back-end.

Website

The website for Lightning is https://phplightning.com/ -- currently, this is exactly the project you get here and what you should see when you get the project running locally after installation. On the roadmap, it'll serve as the documentation website, but consider it a demo for now.

How Fast is Lightning, Really?

Lightning currently scores all 100s in Lighthouse across the board for Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO! Leveraging Nuxt with SSR and GraphQL, along with a sleek but deceptively powerful and optimized PHP 8 back-end, Lightning truly lives up to its name.

Requirements

• Docker for local dev
• PHP 8.2+ (installed with Docker for local)
• Composer
• Node 22+
• MySQL or MariaDB (installed with Docker for local)
• Apache or nginx (nginx installed with Docker for local; .htaccess provided for Apache compatibility)

Templates

Lightning has a basic templating system. Source template files are located in /templates, and there's a sample Nuxt TypeScript + Tailwind template that utilizes the GraphQL API under /templates/default. You can modify this template for your project, or create your own template in the /templates directory and set SITE_TEMPLATE in your .env file.

Local Dev

1. Copy .env.example to .env (you don't need to make any changes for local; the installer will handle them)
2. composer install
3. npm install
4. docker-compose up -d
5. App will be available at http://lightning.local -- No need to run npm run dev -- Docker will run this automatically, and should have full HMR support
6. The installer should run. For local, you won't need to change anything other than the Admin Password
   • You can optionally change the Database Name and Admin Username as well if you want to. Everything else should stay the same!
   • DO NOT change the Database Host, Database Username, or Database Password for local! These must be db, root, and password respectively for the local Docker setup!
7. You can now access the admin at http://lightning.local/admin

Changing the local URL

To change the default local URL, simply change lightning.local.conf in /docker/nginx/sites/ to whatever.local.conf and replace all instances of lightning.local with whatever.local

• If you're using Cypress, also change the baseUrl: 'https://lightning.local' to baseUrl: 'https://whatever.local' in /templates/default/cypress.config.ts
• You may also need to update /docker/nginx/ssl/generate-cert.ps1, /docker/nginx/ssl/generate.bat, and /docker/nginx/ssl/openssl.conf
• Be sure to run docker-compose down and docker-compose up -d --build if changing the site URL

Cypress

The default template comes with some basic Cypress tests to get you started.

1. In /templates/default/cypress.config.ts (or whichever template you are using), set baseUrl: 'https://lightning.local' to the local URL you are using for your project
2. Sample tests can be found in /templates/default/e2e/main.cy.ts
3. Simply run npm run test to run the tests. The tests will run from the template configured in the .env file for SITE_TEMPLATE

Building for Production

1. From the project root, run npm run build. This will run the build for the admin templates as well as the template in the .env file for SITE_TEMPLATE

Running on Production

1. Copy /App, /Lightning, /public, /.env.example, and /composer.json to your server
2. Rename .env.example to .env (don't copy your local .env file to production!)
3. Run composer install
4. Run the installer for prod and create the db and admin user (just go to the main address, or go to yourdomain.tld/install.php)
5. If using Apache, just point your site root to /public and you're done!
6. If using nginx, use /_dev/nginx.conf as a template and modify as noted in the comments at the top of the file