As is mentioned in this post on the Symfony Finland site, the PHP-PM project has hit their first stable release, v1.0, that includes some nice tools as well.

Running an application server written in PHP has been feasible for some years. One of the robus mature options for this has been PHP-PM, a process manager. Now the project has reached a major milestone with the release of 1.0.

The PHP-PM team released the first stable release on 8th of January 2018. It builds on the work done for some years and it builds on ReactPHP. ReactPHP is a low-level library for event-driven programming in PHP.

PHP-PM allows creating long running PHP processes that serve applications directly instead of relying an embedded PHP (like with Apache's mod_php) or a web server with PHP process manager (as with Nginx and PHP-FPM).

Updates for this release include the addition of bridges for static handling, PSR-7 integration and version bumps for Symfony components used in the system. You can check out the full list of changes in the release notes if you want to see more. The post also links to other articles with more reading and tutorials covering PHP-PM and how to put it to use (including Docker integration and basic benchmarks).

On the Symfony Finland site there's a tutorial posted showing you how to run Symfony without a web server using Docker and PHP-PM.

Docker containers have been becoming an increasingly common deployment method in the past few years. I've deployed some Node.js app in containers, which are very simple to deploy as there's a single process that's easy to run. I found running PHP to be more complex.

[...] When running Nginx and PHP-FPM you are forced to run a pair of of containers, one for PHP-FPM and one for PHP-NPM. [...] But I would rather just run a single process to run the application. This is how Go, Node.js and even .NET Core apps are deployed. Can PHP do without a middle man?

While it may not be the most performant way to run a PHP and Symfony application, the author wanted to try it out and see how difficult it might be. The code for the setup is provided and, while the end result was a bit difficult to get to, it was possible.

In a follow up to his previous article about high performance PHP with React's help, Marc Schmidt has returned with a follow up post two years after the fact with some updates and additional information.

This is a follow up article on “Bring High Performance Into Your PHP App”, which went quiet viral with over 100k visits. This does not only show that many people still struggle with PHP and its performance, but also that people are highly interested in a solution to this kind of issues. PHP-PM could be one solution. But first things first. Over two years later since my blog post about high-performance things have changed dramatically.

[...] When I hacked together some lines of code back then in 2013 I never though that this kind of application style would ever succeed in the PHP world. [...] However, things have changed there as well.

He talks about some of the advancements that have been made since his previous post including PHP 7, improvements in PHP-FM and the HttpKernel component of the Symfony framework. Along the lines of bringing even more performance to PHP applications with React, they created an adapter to link the two. The post covers some of the currently open issues, the "good things" about it and some of the design issues to keep in mind when using it. He ends the post talking about where the PHP-PM project is now and some of the benchmarks about performance between PHP-PM and PHP-FPM.

On the Symfony Finland site there's a post about a relatively new way to run PHP applications and how it's "growing up" to become a viable option: PHP-PM.

PHP-PM is a novel way of running PHP applications. Instead of creating an exotic high performance runtime for the PHP language, it takes an alternative route to mechanism of running PHP applications with existing runtimes.

This translates to real performance gains with existing complex applications, not just impressive theoretical benchmark results.

Instead of the usual complete bootstrap that normal PHP process goes through in its lifecycle, PHP-PM runs them as a continuous process, making for a huge boost in overall performance. The project has started gathering more momentum and is being worked on to make it a more credible platform for PHP applications.

From the humble beginnings the PHP-PM now has over 1700 stars on GitHub and a number of developers working on it. Great strides have been done since the early stages with the documentation and ease of use, but most importantly the platform now supports multiple frameworks: Symfony, Zend and Laravel.