ePHPm

Embedded PHP application server, written in Rust.

Run PHP applications without the infrastructure. No PHP-FPM, no MySQL server, no Redis, no reverse proxy, no certbot. One binary, one config file. Drop in WordPress or Laravel and go.

When you need more, it’s already built in: MySQL connection pooling, read/write splitting, a Redis-compatible KV store, clustered SQLite with automatic failover, TLS, and Prometheus metrics.

Get Started → Architecture → GitHub

Built with

ePHPm stands on the shoulders of some excellent open-source projects.

ePHPm ecosystem

• litewire — MySQL/PostgreSQL wire protocol proxy that translates queries to SQLite. This is what lets PHP applications talk pdo_mysql to an embedded SQLite database with zero config changes.
• ephemerd — self-hosted GitHub Actions runner manager. ePHPm borrows its self-installing binary pattern (ephpm install / ephpm uninstall).

Rust crates

• tokio — async runtime powering the HTTP server, KV store, cluster protocol, and every background task
• hyper — low-level HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 implementation behind the request router
• rustls — TLS library for manual cert loading and automatic ACME (Let’s Encrypt)
• rusqlite — SQLite bindings used by litewire for single-node embedded database mode
• chitchat — SWIM gossip protocol library for cluster membership, failure detection, and KV replication
• dashmap — concurrent hashmap backing the in-process KV store
• figment — layered configuration (TOML files + EPHPM_ environment variable overrides)
• clap — CLI argument parsing
• tracing — structured logging and diagnostics
• metrics + metrics-exporter-prometheus — Prometheus-compatible metrics export

Embedded at build time

• PHP — embedded via FFI as a statically linked library (ZTS on Linux/macOS, NTS on Windows)
• static-php-cli — builds PHP and its extensions as a single static archive that gets linked into the ephpm binary
• sqld — Turso’s libSQL server, embedded via include_bytes!() for clustered SQLite replication over gRPC