monad/skeleton

Monad Framework application skeleton.

v1.1.3 2026-08-22 09:30 UTC

Requires

• php: >=8.2
• monad/clarity: ^1.0
• vlucas/phpdotenv: ^5.6

Requires (Dev)

• phpunit/phpunit: ^11.0

MIT

• Marshal Yung

Published on Packagist.org on 2026-08-22 09:30 UTC

README

Application skeleton for the Monad Framework — an MVC-based PHP framework for solo developers and small teams. This is the project you clone/create to build an app; the framework itself lives in monad/clarity, installed as a dependency.

Status: 1.1.1, published on Packagist. Depends on monad/clarity ^1.0, which currently resolves to 1.0.1. The two packages have independent version lines.

Requirements

• PHP >=8.2
• A database: MySQL (default), PostgreSQL, or SQLite
• Node.js — required once at install time to build the stylesheet and copy the vendored JavaScript into public/assets/. Not required at runtime.

Installation

composer create-project monad/skeleton NewApp
cd NewApp
npm install            # builds public/assets/css + copies vendored JS — see below
cp .env_example .env   # fill in APP_SECRET, DB_*, and anything else you need
php mitosis setup      # creates the sessions/caches tables
php mitosis migrate    # runs database/migrations/*
php mitosis serve      # http://127.0.0.1:8000

npm install is not optional for a working page. Its postinstall hook runs npm run build:all, which does two things nothing else does:

• build:css compiles app/client/src/css/styles.css to public/assets/css/styles.css. Tailwind emits only the utility classes it finds while scanning your templates, so a stylesheet built against different markup will silently omit whatever your views actually use — the page renders unstyled rather than erroring.
• build:assets copies jQuery, Preline, DataTables and Chart.js out of node_modules into public/assets/js/ — available if you want them, but the default layout doesn't load any of them — plus the self-hosted Fraunces/IBM Plex Sans/IBM Plex Mono font files the built stylesheet references into public/assets/fonts/.

Re-run npm run build:css (or npm run watch:css while developing) whenever you add Tailwind classes the previous build never saw.

Project layout

app/
├── Controllers/     # App\Controllers\* — PSR-4, capitalised to match the namespace
├── Models/          # App\Models\*
├── Services/        # App\Services\*
├── Middlewares/      # App\Middlewares\* — thin extensions of Monad\Clarity\Middlewares\*
├── routes/           # web.php, api.php, cli.php — plain require'd registration files
└── views/            # resolved by Monad\Clarity\Services\View
config/               # bootstrap.php is the single shared boot path for web/CLI/scripts
database/
├── migrations/
└── seeds/
public/                # web root; index.php is the front controller
mitosis                 # CLI entry point — php mitosis <command>

Controllers, Models, Services, and Middlewares are capitalised deliberately: PSR-4 resolves namespaces to paths case-sensitively, so the directory case must match the namespace segment exactly (App\Controllers\UserController → app/Controllers/ UserController.php). routes/ and views/ stay lowercase since neither is namespace-autoloaded.

The mitosis CLI

php mitosis health          # config, DB connectivity, writable storage, migrations, extensions
php mitosis make:controller UserController
php mitosis make:model User
php mitosis make:service Billing
php mitosis make:migration add_index_to_users
php mitosis migrate
php mitosis migrate:status
php mitosis migrate:rollback
php mitosis db:seed --file=<name>.php       # relative to database/seeds/
php mitosis db:execute <path-to-sql-file>
php mitosis cache:clear
php mitosis logs:clear
php mitosis test                            # delegates to PHPUnit
php mitosis serve                           # PHP's built-in server, port 8000 by default
php mitosis setup                           # creates the sessions/caches tables

Custom commands are registered in app/routes/cli.php.

Testing

composer run test    # or: php mitosis test
composer run lint    # php -l across app/

Tests live in resources/tests/ and use an in-memory SQLite database — no real database required to run the suite. resources/tests/bootstrap.php sets up the small amount of ambient state (PATH, APP_SECRET) a few App\Middlewares\* stubs read at construction.

Middleware stubs

app/Middlewares/* are thin, zero-argument-constructor subclasses of Clarity's engines (Csrf, RateLimiter, CORS, Jsonify, Logger, Authentication, RBAC) — customise by overriding the protected extension points documented on each parent class, or by changing what the constructor passes through (env-driven config, resolver closures against your own tables). Authentication/RBAC here are wired against the example users table (database/migrations/20260101000000_create_users_table.php).

License

MIT. See LICENSE.