Developer Guide

This section covers the StaticPHP development workflow and the foundational knowledge needed to understand how StaticPHP works under the hood.

Overview

StaticPHP is a binary build tool whose core purpose is managing the build pipeline — downloading and configuring PHP source code, resolving extension dependencies, and invoking the underlying build system (e.g., Docker or a local compiler).

From a development perspective, StaticPHP is an open framework that provides the ability to statically build PHP and other open-source tools together. The project is maintained by @crazywhalecc and @henderkes, with contributions from the community.

You can think of StaticPHP as a typical PHP CLI project built on symfony/console.

Development Environment

To get started with StaticPHP development, you'll need a PHP development environment with the required dependencies installed.

Requirements:

• PHP 8.4 or later
• Composer
• Git
• PHP extensions: curl, dom, filter, mbstring, openssl, pcntl, phar, posix, sodium, tokenizer, xml, xmlwriter

These PHP extensions are required for StaticPHP's dev environment.

Setup Steps

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/crazywhalecc/static-php-cli.git
   cd static-php-cli

2. Install PHP dependencies:

   composer install

3. Verify the setup:

   bin/spc --version

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You can continue reading Project Structure to learn more about StaticPHP's framework architecture.