News & Updates
What's new in LibxaFrame
Releases, tutorials, and technical deep-dives from the core team.
Introducing LibxaSocket: realtime that Laravel Echo already speaks
A WebSocket server for LibxaFrame that implements the Pusher protocol, so Echo and pusher-js connect to it unchanged. Built on ReactPHP — the same stack Laravel Reverb uses, which is what checking rather than assuming turned up. Presence channels that count people rather than connections, a signed publishing API, and two framework bugs found on the way.
Introducing Libxa News
A second site at libxa-news.vyloxi.com, where every package in the ecosystem is documented and every release is explained. This site kept giving each package three sentences and a link, which is not documentation.
One command to start: introducing the LibxaFrame installer
libxa new my-app asks which database you want, installs the skeleton, configures it and makes the first commit. A self-contained executable with no dependencies, because the first thing someone runs is the worst place for an install to fail. Plus an agent skill covering what differs from Laravel.
Libxa Desktop 0.4.0: three settings that saved correctly and changed nothing
A PHP version that switched in the interface and nowhere else, a FastCGI port that moved when a different site changed version, an updater that asked for draft releases and so never found one, and a terminal that counted a process dying instantly as success.
Your routes work locally and 404 on the server. Here is why.
The starter kit shipped no .htaccess, so a deployed application answered the home page and returned 404 for every other route. Three separate development environments each hid the bug for a different reason, and the one environment that shows it is the one you only reach after deploying.
Libxa Desktop 0.3.0: HTTPS, preview and a terminal
A certificate authority on your own machine signs certificates for your .test domains, because no public one ever can. Plus a preview window at three viewports, a terminal that opens where the project is, and a TLS toggle that finally does something.
Trusting a certificate authority you created yourself
Why .test can never receive a publicly-trusted certificate, what a certificate authority actually consists of, why leaf certificates expire after 396 days, how to trust a root without administrator rights, and the risk you take on by doing it.
Libxa Desktop 0.2.0: phpMyAdmin, and per-site PHP that actually works
phpMyAdmin now installs in one click, configured against the managed database and bound to your own machine. Pinning it to a supported PHP version exposed a bug underneath: every site had been routed to a single php-cgi, so the per-site version dropdown was recorded, displayed and ignored.
Introducing Libxa Desktop
A local development environment that installs and supervises PHP, Node, Nginx and MySQL, serves every parked project on a .test domain, and scaffolds new applications: starting from a machine with nothing on it.
LibxaFrame 0.10.0: a stability pass, and PHP 8.5
Not a feature release: the one where the framework got a 197-test suite, and the suite found real bugs in header normalisation, redirect safety, middleware short-circuiting and the Vite manifest.
Serving several PHP versions at once
A php-cgi process serves exactly one PHP build, so a per-site version picker has to be backed by one process per version, or it is decorative. How the supervisor and the config generator agree on a port map without sharing any state.
Verifying every runtime you download
Libxa Desktop fetches PHP, Node, Nginx, MariaDB, phpMyAdmin and Composer, and then runs them. What gets checked, who produced each checksum, and what this posture does not protect against.
Why your lock file resolves differently than your manifest says
The starter kit declared PHP ^8.3 and locked packages needing 8.4.1. Three separate settings were causing it, each correct on a maintainer’s machine and wrong everywhere else, with no error message to say so.
The hosts file is not yours alone
Herd keeps a block there. So does Laragon. So do hand-written entries nobody remembers adding. How to add local domains without destroying somebody else’s setup, and how to do it without running the whole app as administrator.
Shipping a private app from a public release repository
A self-updating app fetches its manifest and installer from the user’s machine, unauthenticated. Point that at a private repository and the token ships inside every copy. The two-repository split, and the races that took two releases to find.
What adding PHP 8.5 support actually involves
Rarely the language changes. It is the toolchain that blocks you first, the test suite that makes deprecations fire at all, and two version-range traps that produce no error on the machine where you introduce them.
Porting a React single-page app to Blade
Eight components behind one URL became eight URLs. What that changed, what it improved, what was dropped as React-specific machinery, and the asset bug that made every page load with no stylesheet at all.