Learn About Flight

Flight is a fast, simple, extensible framework for PHP. It is quite versatile and can be used for building any kind of web application. It is built with simplicity in mind and is written in a way that is easy to understand and use—by humans and by AI coding assistants.

Note: You will see examples that use Flight:: as a static variable and some that use the $app-> Engine object. Both work interchangeably with the other. $app and $this->app in a controller/middleware is the recommended approach from the Flight team (and what the official skeleton + AGENTS.md standardize on for new projects).

Core Components

Routing

Learn how to manage routes for your web application. This also includes grouping routes, route parameters and middleware.

Middleware

Learn how to use middleware to filter requests and responses in your application.

Autoloading

Learn how to autoload your own classes. Folder case must match your namespaces—the skeleton uses App\ and PascalCase folders like app/Controller/.

Requests

Learn how to handle requests and responses in your application.

Responses

Learn how to send responses to your users.

HTML Templates

Learn how to render HTML with Twig (skeleton default), Latte, or other engines—not only the built-in PHP views.

Security

Learn how to secure your application from common security threats.

Configuration

Learn how to configure the framework for your application.

Event Manager

Learn how to use the event system to add custom events to your application.

Extending Flight

Learn how to extend the framework to with adding your own methods and classes.

Method Hooks and Filtering

Learn how to add event hooks to your methods and internal framework methods.

Dependency Injection Container (DIC)

Learn how to use dependency injection containers (DIC) to manage your application's dependencies.

Utility Classes

Collections

Collections are used to hold data and be accessible as an array or as an object for ease of use.

JSON Wrapper

This has a few simple functions to make encoding and decoding your JSON consistent.

SimplePdo

PDO at times can add more headache than necessary. SimplePdo is a modern PDO helper class with convenient methods like insert(), update(), delete(), and transaction() to make database operations much easier.

PdoWrapper (Deprecated)

The original PDO wrapper is deprecated as of v3.18.0. Please use SimplePdo instead.

Uploaded File Handler

A simple class to help manage uploaded files and move them to a permanent location.

Important Concepts

Why a Framework?

Here's a short article on why you should use a framework. It's a good idea to understand the benefits of using a framework before you start using one.

Additionally an excellent tutorial has been created by @lubiana. While it doesn't go into great detail about Flight specifically, this guide will help you understand some of the major concepts surrounding a framework and why they are beneficial to use. You can find the tutorial here.

Flight Compared to Other Frameworks

If you are migrating from another framework such as Laravel, Slim, Fat-Free, or Symfony to Flight, this page will help you understand the differences between the two.