Instead of using a local installation of the PHP library, it's possible to create a static build of FrankenPHP thanks to the great static-php-cli project (despite its name, this project support all SAPIs, not only CLI).
With this method, a single, portable, binary will contain the PHP interpreter, the Caddy web server and FrankenPHP!
FrankenPHP also supports embedding the PHP app in the static binary.
We provide a Docker image to build a Linux static binary:
docker buildx bake --load static-builder
docker cp $(docker create --name static-builder dunglas/frankenphp:static-builder):/go/src/app/dist/frankenphp-linux-$(uname -m) frankenphp ; docker rm static-builder
The resulting static binary is named frankenphp
and is available in the current directory.
If you want to build the static binary without Docker, take a look at the macOS instructions, which also works for Linux.
By default, most popular PHP extensions are compiled.
To reduce the size of the binary and to reduce the attack surface, you can choose the list of extensions to build using the PHP_EXTENSIONS
Docker ARG.
For instance, run the following command to only build the opcache
extension:
docker buildx bake --load --set static-builder.args.PHP_EXTENSIONS=opcache,pdo_sqlite static-builder
# ...
To add libraries enabling additional functionality to the extensions you've enabled, you can pass use the PHP_EXTENSION_LIBS
Docker ARG:
docker buildx bake \
--load \
--set static-builder.args.PHP_EXTENSIONS=gd \
--set static-builder.args.PHP_EXTENSION_LIBS=libjpeg,libwebp \
static-builder
See also how to customize the build
If you hit the GitHub API rate limit, set a GitHub Personal Access Token in an environment variable named GITHUB_TOKEN
:
GITHUB_TOKEN="xxx" docker --load buildx bake static-builder
# ...
Run the following script to create a static binary for macOS (you must have Homebrew installed):
git clone https://github.com/dunglas/frankenphp
cd frankenphp
./build-static.sh
Note: this script also works on Linux (and probably on other Unixes), and is used internally by the Docker based static builder we provide.
The following environment variables can be passed to docker build
and to the build-static.sh
script to customize the static build:
FRANKENPHP_VERSION
: the version of FrankenPHP to usePHP_VERSION
: the version of PHP to usePHP_EXTENSIONS
: the PHP extensions to build (list of supported extensions)PHP_EXTENSION_LIBS
: extra libraries to build that add features to the extensionsEMBED
: path of the PHP application to embed in the binaryCLEAN
: when set, libphp and all its dependencies are built from scratch (no cache)NO_COMPRESS
: don't compress the resulting binary using UPXDEBUG_SYMBOLS
: when set, debug-symbols will not be stripped and will be added within the binaryMIMALLOC
: (experimental, Linux-only) replace musl's mallocng by mimalloc for improved performanceRELEASE
: (maintainers only) when set, the resulting binary will be uploaded on GitHub