README

A lightweight PHP framework with a clean MVC architecture. No ORM, no template engine — a skeleton you build on top of, written for developers who like vanilla PHP and want to see exactly what their code does.

Requirements: PHP 8.1+ · MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL · Apache or Nginx

Purpose & who it's for

Most PHP frameworks make you choose between two extremes: something so minimal you rebuild the same plumbing on every project, or something so opinionated (ORMs with hidden queries, template languages to learn, service containers, middleware pipelines) that you spend as much time fighting the framework as building your app.

Tanuki is for developers who like vanilla PHP — who want to see exactly what their code does, without magic in between. It gives you the boring, repetitive parts every project needs (routing, a database layer, sessions, CSRF, i18n) as plain, readable code you can open and understand in five minutes, and gets out of your way for everything else.

You'll feel at home with Tanuki if:

You'd rather write raw SQL through PDO than learn an ORM's query builder.
You want your views to be PHP, not a new templating syntax.
You'd rather delete a folder you don't need than configure a flag to disable it.
You're building a real product (with users, forms, and a database) and want auth and an admin panel available — but only when you ask for them.

This is one repository, not several editions. Everything beyond the core router/models/views — the example TODO CRUD, authentication (tanuki_login), the admin panel (tanuki_admin) — ships in the repo but stays completely inert until you register its routes. If you don't need it, delete it:

Want just the bare minimum?	Delete this
No example CRUD	`models/TodoModel.php`, `controllers/TodoController.php`, `views/todo/`, its entries in `routes.php`/`config/nav.php`
No login	`auth.php`, `config/mail.php`, `controllers/AuthController.php`, `controllers/ProfileController.php`, `models/UserModel.php`, `models/PasswordResetModel.php`, `views/auth/`, `views/profile/`, its `routes.php` entries
No admin panel	the whole `admin/` folder, its `routes.php` entries

Nothing else in the project references these — they were built deliberately isolated so removing them is safe.

What you get out of the box

Simple router with {param} capture and PUT/DELETE form support
Lightweight Active Record (Model) — no ORM magic, real SQL underneath
Plain PHP views, no template language to learn
A working TODO CRUD as a learning example
CSRF protection, XSS escaping, prepared statements everywhere
i18n (t() + JSON dictionaries) with an optional URL-based language switcher
Optional extensions you can add, use, or delete independently: authentication (tanuki_login) and an admin panel (tanuki_admin)

Quick install

git clone <repo-url> my-project
cd my-project
cp .env-example .env
nano .env   # set DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASS, APP_URL
php -S localhost:8050 -t public public/index.php

Documentation

Full documentation lives in the wiki:

Quickstart — install, first steps, your first page
Project Structure
Routing · Controllers & Requests · Models · Views & Layout
Global Helpers · Security
Optional Connections (Redis/MongoDB) · Internationalization
Authentication (tanuki_login) · Admin Panel (tanuki_admin)
Testing · Docker · Xdebug
FAQ

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPLv3) — see the LICENSE file for the full text.

In short: you're free to use, modify, and redistribute this project, including commercially, as long as any distributed derivative work is also licensed under GPLv3 and its source code remains available. This is a copyleft license — it doesn't restrict how you use Tanuki to build your own projects, but if you modify and redistribute Tanuki itself, those modifications must stay open under the same terms.

forja-de-onix / tanuki-framework

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