What is swoft?

Swoft is a PHP framework for building fast web services and APIs. Traditional PHP applications start fresh with every incoming request, which adds overhead. Swoft takes a different approach: it runs persistently in memory using a PHP extension called Swoole, so the application starts once and stays running. This makes it faster at handling large numbers of requests simultaneously. The framework supports multiple types of servers you can run from the command line: an HTTP server for web requests, a WebSocket server for real-time connections, an RPC server for communication between internal services, and a TCP server for lower-level network communication. You start whichever type of server your application needs with a single command. Swoft borrows organizational patterns from enterprise Java frameworks like Spring Cloud, adapted for PHP. It uses annotations in your code to configure routing, dependency injection, and cross-cutting behavior like logging or access control, without requiring large configuration files. It includes connection pools for databases and caches, which means database connections are reused across requests rather than opened and closed each time. The database and cache layers are designed to look and behave similarly to Laravel's equivalents, so developers already familiar with Laravel can work with those parts without relearning. It also includes built-in support for service discovery, circuit breakers (which stop sending requests to a failing service rather than letting errors pile up), rate limiting, and configuration management through external systems like Consul or Apollo. Swoft requires PHP 7.1 or later and the Swoole extension. It installs through Composer, the standard PHP package manager. The documentation site is at swoft.org.