README

A modern, lightweight PHP starter kit and micro-framework with a built-in admin panel, MVC architecture, and Docker support. Designed as a robust foundation for building secure and scalable web applications without the overhead of heavy frameworks.

Core Features & Architecture

🛠️ Custom MVC Micro-framework

Built from scratch with zero heavy dependencies to keep the application blazing fast:

• Routing Engine — Supports GET, POST, route groups, prefixes, and parameter extraction.
• Dependency Injection Container — Intelligent container featuring autowiring via Reflection. Resolves dependencies recursively and supports singletons (getInstance()->bind(...)).
• Middleware Pipeline — Clean request filtering before hitting controllers. Includes built-in AuthMiddleware, AdminMiddleware (with dynamic IP whitelisting), and CsrfMiddleware.

🛡️ Security & Authentication

• Secure Sessions — Stored in Redis with automatic TTL for performance and security.
• CSRF Protection — Integrated middleware automatically generates and validates _csrf tokens on every POST request.
• Authentication — Bcrypt hashed passwords, rate-limiting against brute force, and ready-to-use 2FA logic.
• Role-based Access Control (RBAC) — Distinct permissions for regular users and administrators.

🌐 Localization (i18n)

• Built-in Translation System — A robust helper __('key') maps dictionary files from the lang/ directory to strings in the current user's locale.
• Session & DB tied — Language preferences persist across sessions.

🎨 Themes & UI

• Dark & Light Modes — Native support for theme switching out of the box.
• Dynamic Settings — App name, mail host, UI settings are driven by the settings database table, configurable directly from the Admin Panel instead of hardcoded .env files.

📋 Logging & Telemetry

• Database & File Logging — User actions (user_logs) and daemon background jobs (daemon_jobs_log) are tracked.
• System Dashboard — Built-in SystemService that tracks server metrics (RAM, Disk, CPU Load Average, Uptime) and outputs them to the admin dashboard.

🐳 Docker Ready

• Comes with a complete docker-compose.yml for instant local development.
• Bundles Nginx, PHP-FPM 8.2, MySQL 8.0, and Redis 7.2.

Stack

Requirements

• PHP 8.1+ (if running bare-metal)
• Composer
• MySQL 8.0+ or MariaDB
• Redis server
• Or simply Docker & Docker Compose for local development.

Installation via Composer

The easiest way to start a new project is via Composer:

composer create-project daranger/php-starter my-new-app
cd my-new-app

Composer will automatically clone the repository, remove the git history, and install all dependencies.

Installation via Docker (Alternative)

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/daranger/php-starter.git
   cd php-starter

2. Setup environment

   cp .env.example .env
   # Edit .env to set your database credentials if needed

3. Start the containers

   docker-compose up -d

4. Install PHP dependencies

   docker-compose exec app composer install

5. Run migrations & seed

   # Make sure to run your database migrations/seeds here
   # e.g., import database/Migrations/*.sql

6. Access the application Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost.

Testing

The framework includes a comprehensive test suite powered by PHPUnit.

composer dump-autoload
vendor/bin/phpunit

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License — see the LICENSE file for details.