Notes from the people
making PHP fun again.

We checked Packagist this week and the Leaf packages have passed 740,000 installs between them. That number crept up on us. Leaf started as a tiny router I wrote for my own projects in 2019, and the first release on Packagist went up on the 17th of October that year, so this is a good week to stop and look back at how we got here.

Launch weeks have a way of humbling you, and our Leaf 5 launch week was no exception. This is the story of the worst weekend we've had in a while, and the one boring tool that carried us through it.

Leaf 5 is our biggest release yet. We sat down and rethought what a PHP framework owes you in a world where you build alongside AI: a product-first framework with project context built in, a family of tools that work in any PHP app, and a promise that your code stays clean, readable, and more importantly yours.

The quiet had a reason. Next week you get to try it.

When we shipped Leaf PHP 4, we celebrated a leap forward: sharper APIs, cleaner structure, and a developer experience that felt more intuitive than ever. But as both PHP and Leaf keep evolving at breakneck speed, we realised that “good enough” isn’t good enough anymore. The world has changed — app complexity has grown, developer expectations have soared, and frameworks must keep up. With that in mind, we’re thrilled to present a fresh chapter in the Leaf story — one built on purpose, precision and performance.

It's been 6 months since we released Leaf 4 and Leaf MVC 4, and what a journey it's been! From new features to community growth, we've been busy making Leaf the best framework for Makers. In this recap, we'll highlight some of the exciting developments and what's coming next. Let's dive in!

Today, we are excited to announce the release of Leaf 4 (🌷 Snowdrop) and Leaf MVC 4 (✈️ Hughes H-4 Hercules)! This marks a new chapter in the evolution of Leaf, making PHP development faster, simpler, and more powerful than ever before. We will cover some highlights in this blog post - for a full list of changes and new features, please consult the full changelog on GitHub. Let's dive in!

Over the years, we’ve introduced powerful features and enhancements, but not always with a clear focus on what matters most: helping you build and launch full applications quickly. With Leaf MVC v4 on the horizon, it’s time to double down on what Leaf is truly about—being the framework for Makers.

January wasn’t just a month—it was a launchpad. We kicked off 2025 with a bang, making big moves and setting the stage for even bigger plans ahead. We've got only one day left in January, so it's a perfect time to go through the month and see how we did against our goals.

The first half of 2024 was pretty tough—we were juggling our day jobs with Leaf while dealing with a growing number of issues. We had to step back, re-evaluate our priorities, and by the end of the year, we pushed out a ton of updates to make Leaf more stable and reliable. Now that we’ve checked off most of our 2024 goals, we’re excited to share our 2025 roadmap! Our focus is on making Leaf more reliable, secure, and developer-friendly, with plenty of performance improvements along the way.

We published Leaf Auth v3.3 which brings a lot of usability updates in addition to the long awaited Roles & Permissions feature. Here's everything you need to know about v3.3 (🥀 Sea Buckthorn)

They say the best changes are the ones you don’t see coming, and that's exactly the case here. What started as Leaf MVC v3.8 turned into something much bigger—an idea for a major release we couldn’t ignore. In our last article, we talked about how Leaf MVC had strayed from Leaf's simplicity and had rather started trending in the bloated direction. We promised to fix that, and we did. We pared down the framework to its essentials, making it more modular and flexible, but we couldn't resist the urge to optimize even more, and that's how the idea for Leaf MVC 4 was born. Let's dive into the details of what Leaf MVC 4 will look like and how it will change the way you build web applications with Leaf.

Let's talk about MVC. Leaf has first-class support for the MVC pattern, but we've been thinking about how we can make it better. Is MVC a good pattern for building web applications? Is it too complicated? We'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Welcome to our September issue of the Leaf Catch-Up! Let's take a look at the progress on implementing some of our RFCs and the cool stuff the team has done since our last catch-up. Let's do this!

Over the last few months, we've been testing out different ways to document, share, and respond to your concerns and questions regarding Leaf and its future. We've been using a combination of GitHub issues, Discord, and occasional tweets to keep you updated on our progress. Unfortunately, this has made it difficult for us to keep you in the loop on what we're working on, and for you to share your thoughts and concerns with us. We've been working on a new way to address this issue, and we're excited to introduce Hangouts and Reports.

The first part of this year was tough for Leaf from a development standpoint. Progress was slow, and we found ourselves burdened with a significant amount of technical debt. But it's not all bad news! We're almost back on track and hitting our stride, making up for lost time and working hard to improve Leaf for everyone. In this article, we will share our plans for the final third of the year and the thought process behind each decision. Let's dive in!

Last month we co-hosted the Build First Conference. We used this platform to talk about Leaf, what it is, why you should use it and how to build simple but powerful applications and APIs using Leaf PHP. The event which was co-hosted with SeevCash was a huge success, and this is our recap for those who missed the event.

The Leaf documentation has been partially re-written with a ton of updates to the content and structure. The new docs include more detailed explanations, more examples. The new docs are also more organized and easier to navigate. The new docs also include merged content from Leaf MVC, Leaf API and Skeleton.

We released Leaf 3 early last year. Since then, we've added a ton of functionality and made Leaf 3 even easier to use. In this article, we'll look at how to get started with Leaf, some useful features and a quick-start to building your first Leaf app.

This month, a whole lot of work has been done to improve Eien which was started earlier in October. We added a bunch of features and improved the way Eien works under the hood. Though still in its early stages, Eien is already showing a lot of promise and we're excited to see what the future holds.

Earlier this year, we shared a roadmap for what we had in store for Leaf throughout the year. This article is to take us through what we've been able to achieve, both listed and unlisted on our roadmap.

Eien is Leaf's implementation of a high-speed, high-performance server based on powerful tools like Open Swoole and Swoole. Eien loads your app in memory and shares a state between requests to achieve amazing speeds, up to 40x. Read the docs @ leafphp.dev/modules/eien

We released Leaf Http v2, codenamed 'Weather man 🌤' on 29th May 2022. It comes with a completely rethought base which makes it much simpler to handle requests and responses in your app.

Over the past couple of months, we've talked about our plans for Leaf, but never into details. In this post, we share high-level details of our roadmap, so the community can see our priorities and make plans based off the work we are doing.

The official build of Leaf 3 was released on 15th March, and since then, all our packages are updating to use Leaf 3 as the new default. Make sure to read the breaking changes section to see if you need to make certain changes before the switch to Leaf 3.

We've been planning a new release: version 3 of leaf which has been under development for the past couple of months. This post contains everything you need to know about Leaf 3 ⚡️