Folk

High-performance PHP application server powered by Rust.

Folk replaces nginx + php-fpm with a single binary that handles HTTP, gRPC, background jobs, metrics, and managed processes — all with zero-copy communication between Rust and PHP.

Features

• HTTP server — Built on hyper/axum, dispatches requests to PHP workers
• Background jobs — In-memory or Redis-backed queues with retry policies
• gRPC server — Native gRPC with reflection support
• Prometheus metrics — /metrics and /health endpoints out of the box
• Process manager — Supervised background processes with restart policies
• ZTS multi-worker — Multiple PHP worker threads in a single process (no fork)
• Plugin architecture — Only include what you need

Quick Start

1. Install the extension

pie install folk-project/ext-folk

See Installation for Docker setup and building from source.

2. Install the SDK

composer require folk/sdk

3. Create folk.toml

[workers]
script = "vendor/bin/folk-worker"
count = 4

[http]
listen = "0.0.0.0:8080"

See Configuration for all available options.

4. Run

php vendor/bin/folk-worker

Your application is now serving HTTP on port 8080 with 4 worker threads.

Laravel

1. Install the extension

pie install folk-project/ext-folk

2. Install the package

composer require folk/laravel

Folk integrates with Laravel automatically via a service provider. HTTP routes, job dispatching, and gRPC handlers work out of the box.

3. Create folk.toml

[workers]
script = "vendor/bin/folk-worker"
count = 4

[http]
listen = "0.0.0.0:8080"

See Configuration for all available options.

4. Run

php vendor/bin/folk-worker

Performance

Benchmarks on Docker (2 CPU, 512MB, 4 workers):

Server	Raw JSON (req/s)	Laravel /ping (req/s)
Folk	53,000	3,700
Swoole	73,000	—
RoadRunner	17,000	—
FrankenPHP	3,900	—

See Benchmarks for methodology and full results.

Architecture

Folk runs as a single PHP process with an embedded Rust runtime:

• Rust runtime (tokio) runs in a background thread, handling all I/O: HTTP, gRPC, job queues, metrics
• PHP workers (ZTS threads) handle business logic — your Laravel/Symfony/plain PHP code
• Communication via std::sync::mpsc channels — zero-copy, no sockets, no serialization overhead

Component	Role
Worker 1 (main thread)	PHP worker + process entry point
Workers 2–N (ZTS threads)	Additional PHP workers
HTTP Plugin	Accepts HTTP requests, dispatches to workers
Jobs Plugin	In-memory or Redis job queues
gRPC Plugin	Native gRPC server with reflection
Metrics Plugin	Prometheus /metrics + /health
Process Plugin	Supervised background processes