eboreum/cloner

Immutably clone (copy) objects and override their properties. Works for readonly classes and properties as well.

dev-main 2026-05-17 16:22 UTC

Requires

• php: ^8.5
• eboreum/caster: ^3.0
• eboreum/immutable-interface: ^1.0

Requires (Dev)

• overtrue/phplint: ^9.7
• phpstan/phpstan: ^2.1
• phpunit/phpunit: ^13.1
• slevomat/coding-standard: ^8.27
• squizlabs/php_codesniffer: ^4.0

MIT

• Kasper Søfren

• cloning
• immutability

README

Immutably clone (copy) objects and override their properties. Works for readonly classes and properties as well.

Optionally, add custom logic in a __clone method in your own class to apply regular cloning logic. The logic in the __clone method is executed after values have been copied to a clone.

Requirements

"php": "^8.5",
"eboreum/caster": "^3.0",
"eboreum/immutable-interface": "^1.0"

Installation

Via Composer (https://packagist.org/packages/eboreum/cloner):

composer require eboreum/cloner

Via GitLab:

git clone [e-mail]:eboreum/cloner.git

Alternatives

• myclabs/deep-copy: The nuclear option.
• spatie/php-cloneable: Has uncovered edge cases. See reasoning further down.

License & Disclaimer

See LICENSE file. Basically: Use this library at your own risk.

Contributing

We prefer that you create an issue and or a merge request at https://gitlab.com/eboreum/cloner, and have a discussion about a feature or bug here.

Credits

Authors

• Kasper Søfren (kafoso)
  E-mail: [e-mail]
  Homepage: https://gitlab.com/kafoso / https://github.com/kafoso

Acknowledgements

This implementation is inspired by https://packagist.org/packages/spatie/php-cloneable. However, there are five main differences to the Spatie implementation.

See: https://github.com/spatie/php-cloneable/blob/8760f6ce285a1016075c583eae764f562e214b6d/src/Cloneable.php

These five differences are:

1. The "continue" on line 26 seems like a bug in that it silently ignores unmatched keys in the $values argument.
2. The "bindTo" call on 34 may cause a TypeError. This results in sequential error discovery (one at a time).
3. In eboreum/cloner (this codebase), we walk parent classes to clone parent-scoped properties as well. Something that spatie/php-cloneable does not do, which can lead to undesired behavior.
4. In spatie/php-cloneable, dynamic properties are not transferred.
5. In eboreum/cloner (this codebase), __clone is called when an object defines it.

In the implementation in eboreum/cloner (this codebase):

• Instead of a single TypeError (once per faulty property value), we aggregate all type problems and report all at once.
• If a child class and a parent class both declare a property with the same name, only the first-discovered property may be overridden from $values; later parent-scoped properties with that name are copied from the original object.
• Dynamic properties are transferred, which mirrors the behavior of clone $myObject.
• The __clone method is invoked using a closure bound to the method's declaring class.