Supported Versions

Which versions of PHP and your frameworks Runlet works with, what it was checked against, and what Runlet's own PHP includes. What you need to install Runlet, and the short version of this page, are in Installation.

PHP

Your projects can run on PHP 7.4 to 8.5, on your Mac, in a container, or on a server. Runlet's runner keeps PHP 7.4 syntax, so the same snippet API works on every version.

Needs	Why
tokenizer	To show the last expression's value as the result. Without it, snippets still run, without an implicit result, and a notice says so.
json, pcre	Always part of PHP.

Nothing else is required: no pcntl or posix, and no write access. Runlet writes no files into your project or container, so read-only file systems and non-root users work too.

Checked with:

• Herd PHP 7.4.33 and 8.4.25 on a Mac;
• the php:7.4-cli image as a non-root user, with a read-only root file system and a read-only project folder;
• the php:8.4-cli and php:8.2-cli-alpine images.

What Depends on the PHP Version

Feature	Version
Benchmarks' memory peak	Exact on PHP 8.2 and later. On older PHP, it shows only when it rose above the process's earlier peak.
Profile Run	Any PHP with the Excimer extension. See Profiling.
Magic comments	Every version. They were checked on PHP 8.4, and a subset on PHP 7.4.

Runlet's Own PHP

When your Mac has no PHP, Runlet offers to download its own: PHP 8.5.8, a self-contained command-line PHP of about 26 MB, built for Apple silicon and Intel. The Laravel sandbox and your local projects can run on it.

It includes these extensions: bcmath, bz2, calendar, ctype, curl, dom, excimer, exif, fileinfo, filter, ftp, gd, gmp, iconv, intl, mbstring, mongodb, mysqli, mysqlnd, opcache, openssl, pcntl, pdo, pdo_mysql, pdo_pgsql, pdo_sqlite, pgsql, phar, posix, readline, redis, session, simplexml, soap, sockets, sodium, sqlite3, tokenizer, xml, xmlreader, xmlwriter, zip, and zlib.

It doesn't include Xdebug or other Zend extensions, SPX, imagick, swoole, APCu, or PECL extensions beyond redis, excimer, and mongodb. For a project that needs them, use a PHP you install.

• Trust: it's downloaded only when you click, checked against a SHA-256 checksum built into the app, and must run and report the expected version before Runlet installs it.
• Where: ~/Library/Application Support/Runlet/PHP/, with its licenses.
• Updates: when a newer Runlet comes with a newer build, the one you have keeps working, and Settings ▸ PHP offers the update with what changed. Updating moves your default PHP and your projects' PHP to the new build and removes the old one.
• PHP you installed yourself (Herd, Homebrew, or the php on your PATH) always comes first.

Frameworks

Runlet detects these and boots them for every run. Anything else boots through a project driver.

Framework	Checked with	Notes
Laravel	13.34.0 (the sandbox)	Queries, mail and its interception, logs, previews, App Info, and the environment.
Lumen, Laravel Zero	Not with a real application yet	Detected and booted like Laravel. On Lumen, the database and events are inspected when the application resolved them while booting.
Eloquent without Laravel	illuminate/database 8.83 (PHP 7.4 and 8.4) and 13.34	Queries, through a project driver that boots the application.
Doctrine DBAL	3.10 and 4.5	Queries, with one line in a project driver. DBAL 2 is handled like 3, but wasn't checked.
Symfony	8.1	Queries on the Doctrine connections, and Symfony Mailer's mail. Mail interception needs Symfony Mailer 6.3 or later.
WordPress	7.1, on SQLite and MariaDB 11	Queries through $wpdb, and wp_mail(). Mail interception needs WordPress 5.7 or later, and the environment type 5.5 or later.

What the run inspector records for each one is in Installation.

App Info

The framework chip opens App Info, read from the booted application:

Framework	What it shows
Laravel 9.21 and later, Laravel Zero with about	The same data as php artisan about. Composer's version is left out, because getting it would run Composer.
Lumen, Laravel before 9.21	The configuration, environment, version, and maintenance mode.
Symfony	The kernel's version, its end of maintenance and end of life, and its settings.
WordPress	The site's details, URLs, theme, options, wp-config.php constants, and the database server's version. Keys and salts are never read.

The Application's Environment

When a run boots the application, Runlet reads the environment the application says it's in, and offers to mark the target as production when it says so:

Framework	Environment
Laravel, Lumen, Laravel Zero	app()->environment(): APP_ENV, where a process environment variable wins over .env
Symfony	The kernel's environment (APP_ENV, dev by default)
WordPress 5.5 and later	wp_get_environment_type(): WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE, and production when it isn't set
Project drivers	The driver's environment()
Plain PHP, Composer projects	None

production, prod, prd, and live count as production (the whole name, in any case); local, development, and dev as local.

Profiling

Profile Run needs the Excimer extension in the target's PHP: on Linux, BSD, or macOS. Runlet's own PHP includes it. It was checked with Excimer 1.2.6 on PHP 8.4.

• Profile Run samples wall-clock time, every millisecond. CPU-time sampling isn't available on macOS.
• SPX is detected, and its version shown, but Runlet can't use it: it profiles only processes started with SPX_ENABLED=1, and writes its reports to files.
• Settings ▸ PHP, a Docker profile's Test, and an SSH profile's Test Connection show which profilers a PHP loads.

\Runlet\bench() needs no extension.

Known Limitations

• var_dump() and print_r() output stays text: Runlet doesn't turn it into expandable values. Use dump() or return the value.
• Stop in a running container stops Runlet's PHP process, but processes your snippet started inside the container may keep running. Stopping needs posix_kill or a shell with exec() in the container; without either, Runlet says the PHP process may still be running. The Docker sandbox is different: Runlet owns that container, so Stop removes all of it.
• On your Mac, Stop signals the run's whole process group, so the processes it started stop too.

More, per framework: Framework Drivers.