baron is a super light-weight web framework for PHP.

I often make teeny tiny web apps to solve my own personal problems.

Even with tiny apps, I've found that there's plenty of duplication and boiler plate that would speed up my development cycle. Usually this consists of basic things -- routing, parsing requests, and delivering basic HTML or JSON responses.

After building more or less the same framework 10 times, I decided to just copy the core-bits, clean them up, and make them sharable.

This is baron!

1. Create a new directory for your web app. A basic structure looks like:

   (~/my_app) $ tree
   .
   ├── Core -> ../Core        // Symlink (or perhaps a git-submodule) to this repo
   ├── configuration.php      // PHP file containing "config data"
   ├── phplib                 // Folder where your php classes live
   │   └── Controller
   │       └── Index.php
   ├── routes.php             // PHP file with your routes
   └── www                    // Your static webroot
       └── router.php         // PHP router file -- this is the main entry point to your app
   

2. Setup your basic routes in routes.php. An example router file looks like:

   <?php
   
   $routes = [
       "GET /"                              => "Controller_Index",
       "GET /authorize"                     => "Controller_Authorize",
       "* /api/service/(.*)"                => "Controller_Api_Service",
       "GET /api/threads/(\d+)"             => "Controller_Api_GetThread",
       "POST /assets/upload"                => "Controller_Assets_Upload",
       "POST /api/threads/(\d+)/iterations" => "Controller_Api_CreateIteration",
   ];

3. Setup your application in router.php. This just tells baron the things it needs to know, loads your routes, and loads your routes and loads baron. You can then just start the Router to kick off the application. You can look at the sample file in this repo, but generally it looks something like this:

   <?php
   
   define('WWW_ROOT', dirname(__FILE__));
   define('APP_ROOT', dirname(WWW_ROOT));
   define('PHP_ROOT', APP_ROOT.'/phplib');
   define('CORE_ROOT', APP_ROOT.'/Core');
   define('CONFIG_PATH', APP_ROOT.'/configuration.php');
   
   require APP_ROOT.'/routes.php';
   require CORE_ROOT.'/loader.php';
   
   Router::route($routes);

4. For development purposes, you can use PHP's built-in server:

   (~/my_app/www) $ php -S localhost:8000 ./router.php
   

5. This app was not really written for production purposes, so use at your own risk. For production purposes you'll want to use a standard web-server (i.e - nginx or apache) and route all non-static requests through www/router.php.