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Hello, NativePHP!

NativePHP is a new framework for rapidly building rich, native desktop applications using PHP. If you're already a PHP developer, you'll feel right at home. If you're new to PHP, we think you'll find NativePHP easy to pick up and use. Whatever your path, we think you're going to be productive quickly.

NativePHP makes distributing PHP apps to users on any platform a cinch.

NativePHP is taking the world by storm, enabling PHP developers to create true cross-platform, native apps using the tools and technologies they already know: HTML, CSS, Javascript, and, of course, PHP.

And they said PHP was dead.

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What exactly is NativePHP?

Strictly speaking, NativePHP is a combination of elements:

1. A collection of easy-to-use classes - abstractions - to enable you to interact with a variety of host operating system features.
2. A set of tools to enable building and bundling your native application using either the Electron or Tauri browser environment.
3. A static PHP runtime that allows your app to run on any user's system with zero effort on their part.

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What NativePHP isn't

NativePHP is not an especially opinionated way to build native apps. Right now, we only support a Laravel driver, but we'd love for it to work whatever PHP framework you're using - and even if you're not using a framework at all. Can you help? Please consider contributing.

NativePHP is not a GUI framework. We don't want to tell you how to build your app. You can choose whatever UI toolset makes you and your team feel most productive.

Building a React front-end? No problem. Vue? Sure. Livewire or Inertia? Doesn't matter! Plain old HTML and CSS? You got it. Tailwind? Bootstrap? Material UI? Whatever you want.

NativePHP is not some new, custom fork of PHP. This is the good new PHP you know and love.

It's also not an extension that you need to figure out and install into PHP.

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What's in the box?

NativePHP comes with a bunch of useful features out of the box, including:

• Window management
• Menu management
• File management
• Database support (SQLite)
• Native notifications

All of this and more is explored in the rest of these docs.

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What can I build with NativePHP?

Honestly, anything you want. We believe NativePHP is going to empower thousands of developers to build all kinds of applications. The only limit is your imagination.

You could build a menubar app that lets you manage your cron jobs, or a cool new launcher app, or a screen recorder that puts cowboy hats on every smiley-face emoji it sees.

(You should totally build that last one.)

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What's next?

Go read the docs! We've tried to make them as comprehensive as possible, but if you find something missing, please feel free to contribute.

This site and all the NativePHP repositories are open source and available on GitHub.

Ready to jump in? Let's get started.

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Credits

NativePHP wouldn't be possible without the following projects and the hard work of all of their wonderful contributors:

• PHP
• Electron
• Tauri
• Laravel
• Symfony
• Static PHP CLI