Taylor Otwell, lead developer of the Laravel framework, released a new micro-framework recently based on some of the same components and ideas behind the Laravel framework called Lumen. In this new post from Matt Stauffer you'll get a brief introduction to this new framework and how to get your own instance up and running.

Lumen is a new project from Laravel creator Taylor Otwell. It's a "micro-framework", meaning it's a smaller, faster, leaner version of a full web application framework. PHP has two other popular micro-frameworks, Slim and Silex. Lumen has the same foundation as Laravel, and many of the same components. But Lumen is built for microservices, not so much for user-facing applications (although it can be used for anything.) As such, frontend niceties like Bootstrap and Elixir and the authentication bootstrap and sessions don't come enabled out of the box, and there's less flexibility for extending and changing the bootstrap files.

Matt shows how to get a copy of the framework installed and how to enable some common features. He includes examples of route definitions, API callers and using the simple caching mechanism.