DEV Community: Phalcon PHP Framework

Merry Christmas and Phalcon 5.10.0 Released

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Phalcon Team wishes all of our friends, contributors, developers and users of the framework a Merry Christmas!. We hope that the new year will bring health and happiness to you and your loved ones!

A Christmas present for the community, Phalcon 5.10.0 has been released. This release contains a few bug fixes.

A huge thank you to all of our contributors and the community!!

The release tag can be found here: v5.10.0.

Changelog

Changed

Changed bind() and validate() method in Phalcon\Filter\Validation and Phalcon\Filter\Validation\ValidationInterface to accept $whitelist array of only allowed fields to be mutated when using entity #16800
Changed Phalcon\Storage\Adapters\Libmemcached::getAdapter() to use 50ms for \Memcached::OPT_CONNECT_TIMEOUT #16818
Changed Phalcon\Html\Helper\Input\* to honor Docbloc directives #16778

Added

Added fails() method helper to Phalcon\Filter\Validation useful for standalone validation #16798

Fixed

Fixed Phalcon\Config\Adapter\Yaml constructor to handle null return values from yaml_parse_file(), ensuring empty configuration files are treated as empty arrays instead of throwing errors.
Fixed Phalcon\Http\Request method getClientAddress(true) to return correct IP address from trusted forwarded proxy. #16777
Fixed Phalcon\Http\Request method getPost() to correctly return json data as well and unified both getPut() and getPatch() to go through the same parsing method. #16792
Fixed Phalcon\Filter\Validation method bind() and validate() to correctly bind data when using entity as well as skip binding of fields not included in $whitelist #16800
Fixed Phalcon\Http\Request method getPostData() when Content-Type header is not set #16804
Fixed Phalcon\Events\ManagerInterface adding priority property #16817
Fixed Phalcon\Storage\Adapters\Libmemcached::getAdapter() to correctly merge adapter options #16818
Fixed Phalcon\Encryption\Crypt method checkCipherHashIsAvailable(string $cipher, string $type) to correctly check the cipher or hash type #16822
Fixed Phalcon\Mvc\Model docblocks #16825

Thank you

Once again a huge thank you to our community!

Phalcon v5.9.2 Released

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:01:02 +0000

We are happy to announce that Phalcon v5.9.2 has been released!

This is a maintenance release, primarily fixing a bug we introduced from a previous bug fix :/

Community

A huge thanks to our community for helping out with bug fixing and more importantly bug reporting!

Changelog

Fixed

Fixed Phalcon\Translate\Adapter\Csv the escape argument is explicitly required in PHP 8.4 #16733
Fixed Phalcon\Mvc\Model\Query to use the cacheOptions lifetime over the “cache” service lifetime

Upgrade

Developers can upgrade using PECL

pecl install phalcon-5.9.2

To compile from source, follow our installation document

Phalcon v5.9.1 Released

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:01:02 +0000

We are happy to announce that Phalcon v5.9.1 has been released!

This release fixes a few bugs and introduces an improved Breadcrumbs component in the Html TagFactory.

Community

A huge thanks to our community for helping out with bug fixing and more importantly bug reporting!

Changelog

Changed

Changed Phalcon\Storage\Adapter\AbstractAdapter and dropped has() check before receiving the value. #16705

Added

Added Phalcon\Html\Helper\Breadcrumbs component to replace the old Phalcon\Html\Breadcrumbs component. #16727

Fixed

Fixed Phalcon\Mvc\Micro\LazyLoader::callMethod to prevent Unknown named parameter error #16724

Upgrade

Developers can upgrade using PECL

pecl install phalcon-5.9.1

To compile from source, follow our installation document

Phalcon v5.9.0 Released

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:01:02 +0000

We are happy to announce that Phalcon v5.9.0 has been released!

This release contains a fair amount of changes and bug fixes

PHP 8.4

Support for PHP 8.4 is finally here. After months of background work on Zephir, we are happy to announce that Phalcon can be compiled and run on PHP 8.4.

Due to the nature of the changes, we had to increase the minimum version to PHP 8.1. Users that wish to install Phalcon on PHP 8.0 or earlier, will need to use earlier versions of Phalcon. Please note, that older medium versions are no longer supported for bug fixes.

v6.0.0 update

We are finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel as they say. The only major item to fix for v6.0.0 is the PHQL parser. Work is already underway on this and we are hoping to complete this last task soon, so that we can release an alpha version.

You can always check our efforts in the phalcon/phalcon repository.

Community

A huge thanks to our community for helping out with bug fixing and more importantly bug reporting!

Changelog

Changed

Changed Phalcon\Filter\Validation\Validator\Email to allow UTF8 in local part. #16637
Changed Phalcon\Cache\Cache::getMultiple() to use mget() when the Phalcon\Cache\Adapter\Redis is used. #16689
Changed Storage\Adapter\Redis to accept ssl in the options for secure connections. #16711

Added

Added dispatch:beforeCallAction and dispatch:afterCallAction to last-minute modifications to handler and method (mostly for debugging).

Fixed

Fixed Phalcon\Forms\Form and Phalcon\Filter\Validation to correctly handle the validate() response when using validation class beforeValidate() #16702
Fixed Phalcon\Support\Debug to use correct passed arguments in set_error_handler callback. PHP v7.2.0 deprecated errcontext and has been removed since php v8.0.0 #16649
Fixed Phalcon\Http\Response\Cookies, Phalcon\Http\Response\CookiesInterface and Phalcon\Http\Cookie to use correct cookie default arguments, avoid deprecated null assign warning when trying to assign the same cookie twice #16649
Fixed Phalcon\Encryption\Crypt to use strlen instead of mb_strlen for padding calculations #16642
Fixed Phalcon\Filter\Validation\Validator\File\MimeType::validate to close the handle when using finfo #16647
Fixed Phalcon\Mvc\Model\Manager::getRelationRecords to explicitly set the referencedModel in the conditions along with the referencedFields #16655
Fixed Phalcon\Image\Adapters\AbstractAdapter::watermark to correctly calculate the Y offset #16658
Fixed Phalcon\Dispatcher\AbstractDispatcher when calling action methods that do not define parameters to prevent Unknown named parameter error.
Fixed Phalcon\Di\Injectable to reference the correct instance of Phalcon\Di\Di in the docblock property #16634
Fixed Phalcon\Filter\Filter to have the correct docblock for IDE completion
Fixed Phalcon\Mvc\Model\Query to use the lifetime in the “cache” service if none has been supplied by the options #16696
Fixed Phalcon\Session\Adapter\Stream::gc() to throw an exception if something is wrong with glob() #16713
Fixed Phalcon\Http\Request::getBasicAuth() to return a null password if not defined on the server #16668

Upgrade

Developers can upgrade using PECL

pecl install phalcon-5.9.0

To compile from source, follow our installation document

Merry Christmas and Update

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Sadly, we are not following the tradition of previous years with a new release for Phalcon. We hoped that we were going to be able to have something ready but we could not make it this year.

First and foremost:

A huge thank you to all of our contributors and the community!!

You have all been very generous with your time, proposing fixes, finding bugs, discussing functionality. We are as always grateful for your help.

No release this Christmas :/

We tried but were not able to make it. There has been ongoing work to provide support for PHP 8.4 and that starts from Zephir first. The work thre has not been completed and as such we cannot build a new Phalcon release at the moment. This will of course be addressed but for now we are a bit stuck.

We have also worked on the parsers for v6. @Jeckerson finished the work for Volt and v6 is now using a PHP version of that parser. He has been working on PHQL but it is tedious work to make that conversion so it is not ready yet. Hopefully early next year we will have that one as well as the annotations ready, so that we can release an v6.0.0 alpha.

Thank you

Once again a huge thank you to our community!

Phalcon v5.8.0 Released

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 00:01:02 +0000

We are happy to announce that Phalcon v5.8.0 has been released!

This release fixes memory leaks, several bugs and introduces events in Storage and Cache.

A huge thanks to our community for helping out with bug fixing and more importantly bug reporting!

Changelog

Changed

Changed Phalcon\Mvc\Model, Phalcon\Support\Collection and Phalcon\Support\Registry to correctly implement \Serializable interface. #16591
Changed the Phalcon\Mvc\Router\Group::getHostname() to return null also. #16601
Changed Phalcon\Mvc\View\Engine\Volt\Compiler::compileSource to also return array #16608

Added

Added events and Phalcon\Events\Manager for Phalcon\Storage\Adapter\Apcu,Phalcon\Storage\Adapter\Redis,Phalcon\Storage\Adapter\Memory,Phalcon\Storage\Adapter\Libmemcached,Phalcon\Storage\Adapter\Stream,Phalcon\Storage\Adapter\Weak,Phalcon\Cache\Adapter\Apcu,Phalcon\Cache\Adapter\Redis,Phalcon\Cache\Adapter\Memory,Phalcon\Cache\Adapter\Libmemcached,Phalcon\Cache\Adapter\Stream,Phalcon\Cache\Adapter\WeakPhalcon\Cache\AbstractCache. #16606

Fixed

Fixed Phalcon\Support\Helper\PascalCase causing memory leak by anonymous function #16593
Fixed Phalcon\Mvc\Model\Query to rollback failed transactions and re-throw exception for data consistency #16604

Upgrade

Developers can upgrade using PECL

pecl install phalcon-5.8.0

To compile from source, follow our installation document

Phalcon + Swoole in High Load Micro Service

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This journey took me four years in total. Four years of meticulous planning, incremental steps, and countless hours of coding and debugging to migrate everything related to this service.

In this post, I will share our experience of rewriting a high-load microservice using Phalcon with Swoole, why we decided to make this shift, the obstacles we encountered, and how we overcame them. Whether you’re a PHP enthusiast or someone who has dismissed it as a language suited only for small-time projects, our story will provide insights and maybe offer even a few laughs.

Let’s dive into how we turned PHP into a high-performance powerhouse!

Let’s be honest: PHP often gets a bad rap. It’s the go-to language for setting up quick-and-dirty blog sites on platforms like WordPress or Drupal or some corporate CRM with any well known framework. It’s the Swiss Army knife of web development - versatile and everywhere, but often underestimated in serious, high-performance or even enterprise applications.

But what if I told you that PHP could easily compete with the big guns in the world of high-load applications? Enter the powerful combination of Phalcon and Swoole. Imagine supercharging your trusty old PHP setup, giving it the boost it needs to handle thousands of requests per second with ease.

When our team embarked on the journey to rewrite our high-load microservice, we were already well-versed in the capabilities of PHP, particularly with Phalcon. As a core developer of Phalcon, I was familiar with its potential for high performance and efficiency. However, the classic PHP setup: PHP-FPM with Nginx - just wasn’t cutting it for our needs.

Project history and background

Our project began as a legacy codebase, originally written in PHP 5.6 and later upgraded to PHP 7.0. This monolithic application was running in a private datacenter, deployed across multiple Proxmox virtual machines. The infrastructure was substantial, boasting 50-100 CPUs and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. Despite this considerable hardware, the classic stack of nginx and PHP-FPM wasn’t delivering the performance and scalability we needed.

The application served a critical role in our operations, but as traffic and data volumes grew, the limitations of our setup became increasingly apparent. The traditional PHP-FPM model, which spawns a separate process for each request, was struggling under the load, leading to high latency and inefficient resource utilization.

Planning and Design

Initially, we considered rewriting the entire codebase in Golang, as we had successfully done with a similar application. Golang’s performance and concurrency model made it an attractive option for high-load applications. However, the project’s complexity presented a significant challenge: there were thousands of hard-coded business logic rules embedded throughout the code. Migrating all that logic to Golang in a single iteration was impractical.

We needed a solution that allowed us to proceed in very small, manageable steps, minimizing disruption while gradually improving performance and scalability. This led us to explore alternative approaches within the PHP ecosystem that could leverage our existing knowledge and infrastructure, while providing the performance boost we needed.

Phalcon, combined with Swoole, offered a compelling path forward. However, Phalcon wasn’t originally designed to work in tandem with Swoole. There were no existing libraries or guidelines on how to integrate the two. So, I decided to implement a bridge that allows Swoole’s Request and Response to be passed to Phalcon, processed inside Phalcon’s MVC, and then the output returned back to Swoole to be sent to the client.

Implementation

During this implementation, we encountered several technical challenges, the most significant being memory management issues. Since the service is started once and everything stays in memory, our logic needed to manage memory efficiently to ensure stability and prevent memory leaks. These leaks started to appear frequently, which is a common issue in such setups but required meticulous attention to resolve.

Our application functions as a data input validator, processing incoming data and asynchronously sending it to Kafka. In the new version we implemented an internal hot cache using Swoole\Table, which updates data from S3 every hour via Swoole\Tick. It stores data inside memory so there is minimal latency to fetch data and parameters.

Challenges and Solutions

There were additionally several problems within Phalcon itself that contributed to the memory leaks. I spent a significant amount of time identifying, debugging, and fixing these issues. This process was crucial to ensure that our new architecture would be stable and performant in the long run.

This approach allowed us to incrementally refactor our application, maintaining the business logic in PHP, while significantly enhancing performance with Swoole’s asynchronous capabilities. This strategy provided the balance between continuity and improvement that we needed to tackle the complex, step-by-step migration.

Choosing a Kafka client that works reliably with AWS MSK (Managed Kafka broker inside AWS) and connects once during server bootstrap was crucial. The client needed to handle the specifics of AWS MSK, including authentication and maintaining a persistent connection.

After adapting Swoole’s Kafka client and implementing missing features such as authentication to AWS MSK (Managed Kafka broker inside AWS), we have achieved a stable system with no memory leaks.

Results and Outcomes

The journey was challenging, but the results have been highly rewarding…

Daily ingress of one of geos

Stability and Performance

One of the primary goals of our migration was to achieve stability and improve performance. This was a significant accomplishment given the previous issues we faced with memory management.

Efficient Memory Usage

Through rigorous debugging and optimization, we managed to eliminate memory leaks that had previously plagued our application. The continuous running nature of the service, with everything in memory, required careful handling of memory allocation and deallocation. Our efforts paid off, resulting in a highly stable system that can handle sustained high loads without degradation in performance.

Improved Response Times

The combination of Phalcon’s efficiency and Swoole’s asynchronous capabilities has led to significant improvements in response times. Our average response time is now consistently stable, even under heavy loads. This has greatly enhanced the user experience, providing faster and more reliable service.

Enhanced Scalability

The new architecture has dramatically improved the scalability of our microservice. We can now handle a much larger volume of requests with the same hardware resources, thanks to the efficient handling of concurrent connections and resource management provided by Swoole.

Simplified Maintenance

By maintaining the business logic in PHP and leveraging Phalcon’s MVC framework, we have made the application easier to maintain and extend. The clear separation of concerns and modular design allowed us to introduce new features and make changes without disrupting the existing functionality.

Integration with AWS MSK

Implementing the missing features for Swoole’s Kafka client, such as authentication to AWS MSK, has allowed us to seamlessly integrate with AWS’s managed Kafka service. This has provided us with a reliable and scalable messaging solution that further enhances the robustness of our microservice.

Ease of Deployment

Example of Dockerfile:

FROM php:8.1-cli

COPY . /srv
WORKDIR /srv

RUN pecl install phalcon swoole

EXPOSE 9501

ENTRYPOINT ["php", "/srv/server.php"]

Conclusion

Rewriting our high-load microservice with Phalcon and Swoole has been a transformative process. We have not only achieved our goals of improved stability and performance but also set a strong foundation for future growth and scalability. This project demonstrates that with the right tools and approach, PHP can power high-performance applications capable of handling significant workloads efficiently.

Phalcon v5.7.0 Released

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Fri, 17 May 2024 00:01:02 +0000

We are happy to announce that Phalcon v5.7.0 has been released!

This release fixes a new setting for php.in, some changes and fixes to bugs.

A huge thanks to our community for helping out with bug fixing and more importantly bug reporting!

Changelog

Changed

Changed Phalcon\Support\HelperFactory to use the internal mapper for better memory management #16571

Added

New ini setting phalcon.form.strict_entity_property_check for Phalcon\Forms\Form to enable strict entity property checking. #16567

Fixed

Fixed Phalcon\Mvc\Cli\Router to extend the Phalcon\Mvc\Cli\RouterInterface #16551
Fixed Phalcon\Filter\Validation\Validator\StringLength::validate() to correctly use the include parameter #16560
Fixed Phalcon\Db\Column::TYPE_BINARY and Phalcon\Db\Column::TYPE_TINYINTEGER to have unique values #16532
Fixed Phalcon\Forms\Form to bind only existing properties on entities, based on phalcon.form.strict_entity_property_check setting. #16567
Fixed Phalcon\Filter\Sanitize\BoolVal to correctly handle integers. #16582

Upgrade

Developers can upgrade using PECL

pecl install phalcon-5.7.0

To compile from source, follow our installation document

Phalcon v5.6.2 Released

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:01:02 +0000

We are happy to announce that Phalcon v5.6.2 has been released!

This release fixes a few bugs.

A huge thanks to our community for helping out with bug fixing and more importantly bug reporting!

Changelog

Changed

Changed Phalcon\Mvc\View\Engine\Volt\Compiler::filter to use the helper with upper and lower for UTF-8 characters #16543
Changed Phalcon\Di\AbstractInjectionAware to extend stdClass for PHP 8.2 deprecation warnings #16543

Upgrade

Developers can upgrade using PECL

pecl install phalcon-5.6.2

To compile from source, follow our installation document

2023 Financial Update

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Time for a financial update for the project.

We have to apologize for the lack of financial update posts. The last update was in 2020 (:/). With this post we are rectifying the lack of reporting and are posting our financial update for 2023, 2022 and 2021.

We promised to be as transparent as possible with our community and contributors, so that you all know what your contributions are funding.

You can always check the status of our finances in our Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors pages at any time.

2023 Financial Summary

Overview

We have a good amount of funds available to us. Right now our account has 11,944.46 USD. As you can see in Open Collective we have been very frugal with the funds, and only used it for certain services or sponsoring certain activities.

In Detail

In 2023, money was spent paying for computer upgrades for the team, services for the framework, as well as sponsoring work. The next biggest expense was, as always, processing fees and fees for OpenCollective.

All amounts are in USD.

Income

Source	Amount
OpenCollective	2,646.71
GitHub Sponsors	3,096.75

Expenses

8,772.86 USD

OpenCollective

Date	Type	USD	Description
2023-12-31	Fees	588.58	Hosting Fees
2023-12-31	Fees	148.29	Processor Fees

Compensation

Date	Type	USD	Description
2023-03-28	Compensation	1,000.00	Jeckerson
2023-06-26	Compensation	280.00	Arhell
2023-06-28	Compensation	1,000.00	Jeckerson
2023-07-04	Compensation	890.00	niden (storage purchase)
2023-09-02	Compensation	2,000.00	Jeckerson
2023-09-27	Compensation	225.02	niden (motherboard upgrade)
2023-10-19	Compensation	549.76	niden (case, memory, cooler upgrades)
2023-12-08	Compensation	2,000.00	Jeckerson

Operations

Date	Type	USD	Description
2023-09-27	Services	91.22	Email Service

2022 Financial Summary

Income

Source	Amount
OpenCollective	3,107.69
GitHub Sponsors	7,811.78

Expenses

8,274.99 USD

OpenCollective

Date	Type	USD	Description
2022-12-31	Fees	1,109.06	Hosting Fees
2022-12-31	Fees	251.89	Processor Fees

Compensation

Date	Type	USD	Description
2022-01-27	Compensation	2,000.00	Jeckerson
2022-03-30	Compensation	1,500.00	Jeckerson
2022-09-20	Compensation	2,000.00	Jeckerson
2022-10-26	Compensation	549.97	niden (computer components)
2022-11-12	Compensation	2,000.00	Jeckerson
2022-09-27	Compensation	225.02	niden (storage purchase)

2021 Financial Summary

Income

Source	Amount
OpenCollective	3,984.83
GitHub Sponsors	4,735.87

Expenses

3,835.17 USD

OpenCollective

Date	Type	USD	Description
2023-12-31	Fees	596.60	Hosting Fees
2023-12-31	Fees	306.63	Processor Fees

Compensation

Date	Type	USD	Description
2021-04-11	Compensation	163.80	Aziz
2021-08-08	Compensation	222.58	Aziz
2021-08-22	Compensation	1,000.00	Jeckerson
2021-09-18	Compensation	467.50	Aziz
2021-10-28	Compensation	1,000.00	Jeckerson
2021-11-12	Compensation	230.00	Aziz
2021-11-18	Compensation	350.00	niden (storage purchase)
2021-11-27	Compensation	292.00	AlexNDRmac (storage purchase)

Operations

Date	Type	USD	Description
2021-08-24	Services	109.29	Email Service

Thank you

As always, a huge thank you to all of our contributors, financial or other. Your contributions help this project move forward!

Phalcon v5.6.1 Released

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:01:02 +0000

We are happy to announce that Phalcon v5.6.1 has been released!

This release fixes a few bugs and the oh so dreaded deprecation warning for “self” in callables!.

A huge thanks to our community for helping out with bug fixing and more importantly bug reporting!

Changelog

Changed

Changed Phalcon\Cli\Router::setDefaultAction and Phalcon\Cli\Router::setDefaultModule to return the object back for a fluent interface #16328

Fixed

Fixed Phalcon\Db\Adapter\Pdo\Postgresql::describeColumns() to return the correct string back #16371
Fixed Phalcon/Filter/Validation::validate() and Phalcon/Filter/Validation/ValidationInterface::validate() to return also bool #16337
Fixed Phalcon\Mvc\Model::toArray to ignore getters when the field name is source. #16514
Fixed Phalcon\Http\Request::getPut to correctly get form encoded data #16519
Fixed deprecation warning in callables Use of "static" in callables is deprecated for PHP 8.2+ #16263

Upgrade

Developers can upgrade using PECL

pecl install phalcon-5.6.1

To compile from source, follow our installation document

Phalcon v5.6.0 Released

Nikolaos Dimopoulos — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:01:02 +0000

We are happy to announce that Phalcon v5.6.0 has been released!

This release fixes a few bugs.

A huge thanks to our community for helping out with bug fixing and more importantly bug reporting!

Changelog

Changed

Changed Phalcon\Db\Adapter\Pdo\Mysql to not use specific flags for PDO (PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES or PDO::ATTR_STRINGIFY_FETCHES) for performance reasons #16474
Merged Phalcon\Db\AbstractDb with Phalcon\Db\Adapter\AbstractAdapter since the former was not used #16474

Added

Added resetColumns(), resetFrom(), resetWhere(), resetGroupBy(), resetHaving(), resetOrderBy(), resetLimit(), resetFlags() to the Phalcon\Datamapper\Query\AbstractQuery to allow resetting query filters.

Fixed

Fixed Phalcon\Mvc\Model::count to ignore the order parameter (needed for Posgresql) #16471
Fixed Phalcon\Mvc\Model::toArray added parameter to ignore getters in order not to break serialize. #16490
Fixed Phalcon\Mvc\Model::toArray changing the conditionals for population to remove segfault. #16498

Upgrade

Developers can upgrade using PECL

pecl install phalcon-5.6.0

To compile from source, follow our installation document