Potager (French for "kitchen garden") — a place where things grow from scratch, step by step.
Potager is a student-driven project with one goal: build a PHP framework from the ground up, learning everything along the way.
This is an educational experiment. A group of students decided the best way to understand how PHP frameworks work is to build one themselves — no shortcuts, no magic, just code and curiosity.
We are not trying to replace Laravel, Symfony, or any other established framework. We are trying to understand how they work by recreating the core concepts ourselves.
- Routing — matching URLs to controllers
- Dependency Injection Container — managing class dependencies automatically
- ORM / Query Builder — talking to databases in an expressive way
- Templating Engine — rendering views cleanly
- Middleware — intercepting and handling HTTP requests
- CLI tooling — developer-friendly command-line helpers
- Learn by doing
- Keep it simple and readable
- Prefer clarity over cleverness
- Document everything so others can learn too
This project is work in progress and actively developed as a learning exercise. Expect rough edges, breaking changes, and plenty of comments explaining why things are done a certain way.
This is a student project — everyone is welcome to learn alongside us. Feel free to open issues, ask questions, or suggest ideas. Pull requests are warmly welcomed!
MIT — free to use, study, and build upon.