Elegant PHP
for Modern Developers
Leaf is a lightweight and user-friendly framework designed for quick and efficient development. It features a zero-config setup and an ecosystem of tools, making it ideal for building scalable apps with ease.
Powerful tooling that grows with you
Leaf offers lightweight, customizable tools, allowing you to tailor your application with only the necessary features. It supports a vast ecosystem of modules and millions of PHP packages, eliminating the need to reinvent the wheel 🚀
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Powerful Routing
Leaf comes with a super lightweight but powerful router that handles all the heavy lifting for you.
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Dead-simple Authentication
Create full-fledged authentication systems for your API or with a full UI in seconds with Leaf Auth.
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Powerful DB Layer
Leaf provides a highly performant database layer for all your queries with support for ORMs like Eloquent.
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Multiple Flavours
No application is the same, why should every framework be the same? Customize your Leaf installation with our powerful CLI.
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Useful App Utils
From data fetching to dates, validation, caching, mailing, logging, everyday functions and all those goodies, Leaf has got you covered.
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Graceful Erroring
There are no “Oh no!” moments with Leaf. We've got all the tools you need to fail-in-style: from devtools to debug modes and custom errors.
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Dynamic View Layer
Leaf supports multiple template engines and even frameworks like React, Vue and Svelte.
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Friendly system utilities
Access/modify system info securely without dealing with the complex functions taken directly from C.
30+ modules
Full list of Leaf modules
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Simplified Http API
Leaf provides user-friendly APIs for handling requests, CORS, sessions, cookies and everything in-between.
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Swoole Support
Leaf + Swoole = Rocket + Gravity assist. Leaf offers a clean way to use Swoole with the same API.
From install to deploy in minutes 🚀
Leaf prides itself on it’s ease of use, and especially its ease of deployment. Leaf will happily run anywhere PHP is available without asking any questions. Shared hosting? No problem, just drag and drop!
Try it out️
We’ve said enough about Leaf and what it can do. Why don’t you try changing the code below and see what you can create. If you want to follow a guided tutorial in our sandbox, you can check out the interactive tutorial 🏄♀
Go to tutorialLeaf is all of us
Leaf is fully community backed. Your donations go a long way to help us keep Leaf running and keep up with the demand associated with the growth of our tools. Here are our top sponsors ❤️
Loved by thousands of product people like you.
Today’s web development landscape demands tools that are fast, lightweight, and capable of growing with your projects. Many PHP frameworks try to do it all, making it challenging to find one that truly checks all these boxes—often adding unnecessary complexity to projects that need to stay nimble. That’s where Leaf shines. It gives the essentials to start building right away, with the flexibility to add exactly the features you need, precisely when you need them.
Thanks for making this! I have been looking for an alternative to Silex for a few years now. I have tried other frameworks like Lumen, Laravel & Slim, but they were always a pain to setup with my VMs, and usually forced you to adhere to a console generated bundle.
As a design/frontend-heavy agency, we needed a lightweight, but powerful framework that would just work on our servers without any hassle. Leaf has been a great choice for us as it allows us to build our APIs really fast, giving us time to focus on what we want: the design and experience of our projects.
Awesome, I just found about it and already using it for a client's site.Clean, well organized and the MVC versión is just great!!!
Building with Leaf has been the most simple and straightforward approach to getting an app production ready
I'm currently looking for a framework to replace our in-house built MVC framework which we have spent quite some time building over the years. I just don't "get" the major frameworks and to me I want something simple which I can add to if needed and now I come across Leaf. Wow. I think you've done a great job! ... Thanks!
Dig into our vibrant community with us.
Our first community meet up was in 2023 which we held together with SeevCash. Since then our community has gotten bigger, growing together with Leaf and all the tools in the ecosystem. Join our young but vibrant community and the Leaf team as we discuss our insights from the past year and what’s to come in the next couple of years 🚀
Join the community
Leaf is a slim and lightweight PHP framework focused on developer experience, usability, and high-performance code. It is a modern PHP framework built to be simple and elegant, yet extremely powerful.
