Build single static PHP binary, with PHP project together, with popular extensions included.

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The project name is static-php-cli, but it actually supports cli, fpm, micro and embed SAPI 😎

Compile a purely static php-cli binary file with various extensions to make PHP applications more portable! (cli SAPI)

You can also use the micro binary file to combine php binary and php source code into one for distribution! (micro SAPI)

This SAPI feature is from the Fork of dixyes/phpmicro.

The current README contains basic usage. For all the features of static-php-cli, see https://static-php.dev .

If you don't want to compile yourself, you can download example pre-compiled artifact from Actions, or from self-hosted server.

Below are several precompiled static-php binaries with different extension combinations, which can be downloaded directly according to your needs.

• Extension-Combination - common: common contains about 30+ commonly used extensions, and the size is about 22MB.
• Extension-Combination - bulk: bulk contains 50+ extensions and is about 70MB in size.
• Extension-Combination - minimal: minimal contains 5 extensions and is about 6MB in size.

Yes, this project is written in PHP, pretty funny. But static-php-cli runtime only requires an environment above PHP 8.1 and mbstring, pcntl extension.

Here is the architecture support status, where represents support for GitHub Action builds, 💻 represents support for local manual builds, and blank represents not currently supported.

	x86_64	aarch64
macOS	💻	💻
Linux	💻	💻
Windows
FreeBSD	💻	💻

macOS-arm64 is not supported for GitHub Actions, if you are going to build on arm, you can build it manually on your own machine.

Currently supported PHP versions for compilation are: 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3.

Please first select the extension you want to compile based on the extension list below.

• Supported Extension List
• Command Generator

If an extension you need is missing, you can submit an issue.

Here is the current planned roadmap for extension support: #152 .

Use GitHub Action to easily build a statically compiled PHP, and at the same time define the extensions to be compiled by yourself.

1. Fork me.
2. Go to the Actions of the project and select CI.
3. Select Run workflow, fill in the PHP version you want to compile, the target type, and the list of extensions. (extensions comma separated, e.g. bcmath,curl,mbstring)
4. After waiting for about a period of time, enter the corresponding task and get Artifacts.

If you enable debug, all logs will be output at build time, including compiled logs, for troubleshooting.

• When using ubuntu-latest, it will build linux-x86_64 binary.
• When using macos-latest, it will build macOS-x86_64 binary.

This project provides a binary file of static-php-cli. You can directly download the binary file of the corresponding platform and then use it to build static PHP. Currently, the platforms supported by spc binary are Linux and macOS.

Here's how to download from GitHub Actions:

1. Enter GitHub Actions or self-hosted nightly builds.
2. If you download from GHA, select the latest build task, select Artifacts, and download the binary file of the corresponding platform.
3. If you download from GHA, unzip the .zip file. After decompressing, add execution permissions to it: chmod +x ./spc.
4. If you download from self-hosted server, download spc-$os-$arch file and just use it (don't forget chmod +x).

SPC single-file binary is built by phpmicro and box, and it doesn't need to install PHP. Just treat spc as a standalone executable.

Clone repo first:

git clone https://github.com/crazywhalecc/static-php-cli.git

If you have not installed php on your system, you can use package management to install PHP (such as brew, apt, yum, apk etc.).

And you can also download single-file php binary and composer using command bin/setup-runtime. The PHP runtime for static-php-cli itself will be downloaded at bin/php, and composer is at bin/composer.

cd static-php-cli
chmod +x bin/setup-runtime
# It will download php-cli from self-hosted server and composer from getcomposer.org
./bin/setup-runtime

# Use this php runtime to run static-php-cli compiler
./bin/php bin/spc

# Use composer
./bin/php bin/composer

# Initialize this project
cd static-php-cli
composer update
chmod +x bin/spc

Basic usage for building php and micro with some extensions:

If you are using the packaged spc binary, you need to replace bin/spc with ./spc in the following commands.

# Check system tool dependencies, fix them if possible
./bin/spc doctor
# fetch all libraries
./bin/spc download --all
# only fetch necessary sources by needed extensions
./bin/spc download --for-extensions=openssl,pcntl,mbstring,pdo_sqlite
# with bcmath,openssl,tokenizer,sqlite3,pdo_sqlite,ftp,curl extension, build both CLI and phpmicro SAPI
./bin/spc build bcmath,openssl,tokenizer,sqlite3,pdo_sqlite,ftp,curl --build-cli --build-micro

You can also use the parameter --with-php=x.y to specify the downloaded PHP version, currently supports 7.4 ~ 8.3:

# Using PHP >= 8.0 is recommended, because PHP7 cannot use phpmicro
./bin/spc fetch --with-php=8.2 --all

Now we support cli, micro, fpm, you can use one or more of the following parameters to specify the compiled SAPI:

• --build-cli: build static cli executable
• --build-micro: build static phpmicro self-extracted executable
• --build-fpm: build static fpm binary
• --build-embed: build embed (libphp)
• --build-all: build all

If anything goes wrong, use --debug option to display full terminal output:

./bin/spc build openssl,pcntl,mbstring --debug --build-all
./bin/spc fetch --all --debug

In addition, we build NTS (non-thread-safe) by default. If you are going to build ZTS version, just add --enable-zts option.

./bin/spc build openssl,pcntl --build-all --enable-zts

Adding option --no-strip can produce binaries with debug symbols, in order to debug (using gdb). Disabling strip will increase the size of static binary.

php-cli is a single static binary, you can use it like normal php installed on your system.

When using the parameter --build-cli or --build-all, the final compilation result will output a binary file named ./php, which can be distributed and used directly. This file will be located in the directory buildroot/bin/, copy it out for use.

cd buildroot/bin/
./php -v                # check version
./php -m                # check extensions
./php your_code.php     # run your php code
./php your_project.phar # run your phar (project archive)

phpmicro is a SelF-extracted eXecutable SAPI module, provided by phpmicro project. But this project is using a fork of phpmicro, because we need to add some features to it. It can put php runtime and your source code together.

When using the parameter --build-all or --build-micro, the final compilation result will output a file named ./micro.sfx, which needs to be used with your PHP source code like code.php. This file will be located in the path buildroot/bin/micro.sfx, simply copy it out for use.

Prepare your project source code, which can be a single PHP file or a Phar file, for use.

echo "<?php echo 'Hello world' . PHP_EOL;" > code.php
cat micro.sfx code.php > single-app && chmod +x single-app
./single-app

If you package a PHAR file, just replace code.php with the phar file path. You can use box-project/box to package your CLI project as Phar, It is then combined with phpmicro to produce a standalone executable binary.

# Use the micro.sfx generated by static-php-cli to combine,
bin/spc micro:combine my-app.phar
# or you can directly use the cat command to combine them.
cat buildroot/bin/micro.sfx my-app.phar > my-app && chmod +x my-app

# Use micro:combine combination to inject INI options into the binary.
bin/spc micro:combine my-app.phar -I "memory_limit=4G" -I "disable_functions=system" --output my-app-2

In some cases, PHAR files may not run in a micro environment. Overall, micro is not production ready.

When using the parameter --build-all or --build-fpm, the final compilation result will output a file named ./php-fpm, This file will be located in the path buildroot/bin/, simply copy it out for use.

In common Linux distributions and macOS systems, the package manager will automatically generate a default fpm configuration file after installing php-fpm. Because php-fpm must specify a configuration file before running, the php-fpm compiled by this project will not have any configuration files, so you need to write php-fpm.conf and pool.conf configuration files yourself.

Specifying php-fpm.conf can use the command parameter -y, for example: ./php-fpm -y php-fpm.conf.

When using the project parameters --build-embed or --build-all, the final compilation result will output a libphp.a, php-config and a series of header files, stored in buildroot/. You can introduce them in your other projects.

If you know embed SAPI, you should know how to use it. You may require the introduction of other libraries during compilation, you can use buildroot/bin/php-config to obtain the compile-time configuration.

For an advanced example of how to use this feature, take a look at how to use it to build a static version of FrankenPHP.

If the extension you need is missing, you can create an issue. If you are familiar with this project, you are also welcome to initiate a pull request.

If you want to contribute documentation, please go to static-php/static-php-cli-docs.

Now there is a static-php organization, which is used to store the repo related to the project.

You can sponsor my project on this page.

This project itself is based on MIT License, some newly added extensions and dependencies may originate from the the other projects, and the headers of these code files will also be given additional instructions LICENSE and AUTHOR.

These are similar projects:

• dixyes/lwmbs
• swoole/swoole-cli

Due to the special nature of this project, many other open source projects such as curl and protobuf will be used during the project compilation process, and they all have their own open source licenses.

Please use the bin/spc dump-license command to export the open source licenses used in the project after compilation, and comply with the corresponding project's LICENSE.