Composer Without PHP: Embedding vivacity in ePHPm

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 23:20:00 -0700

The pitch for ePHPm is one binary in place of php-fpm, nginx and Redis. There was always a hole in it though. To deploy a PHP app you still need to run composer install. That drags PHP and composer.phar back onto the box or into the container build, just for that one step. ephpm composer install now runs a pure-Rust, Composer-compatible installer called vivacity inside the ePHPm binary. One binary serves the app and installs its dependencies. On Windows that works with no PHP installed at all. Getting it right took five upstream PRs and a fork. It also took a docs rewrite that took back claims we’d already made. And I had to teach ephpm to pretend to be php.

Calling Rust From PHP Without a Socket, Part 2: Making Existing Code Use It

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:55:00 -0700

Part 1 covered the plumbing. ePHPm registers ephpm_kv_* and ephpm_db_* functions that call straight into Rust. A cache read through one costs about a tenth of a microsecond instead of a loopback round trip. That’s nice and also useless on its own. Nobody is going to rewrite their WordPress object cache or their Laravel cache store around a function called ephpm_kv_set(). Applications talk to existing APIs instead:

Redis through phpredis or Predis
the cache through PSR-6/16 or wp_cache_*
the database through wpdb, mysqli, Eloquent or DBAL

So there’s a set of Composer packages in the ephpm org whose whole job is to sit under those APIs and route them to the native functions. This post covers what’s in them and the rule that decides when they switch on. It also covers the bugs that only showed up once real applications ran on top.

Composer on Luther Monson

Composer Without PHP: Embedding vivacity in ePHPm

Calling Rust From PHP Without a Socket, Part 2: Making Existing Code Use It