Shipping Without a Framework: Standalone Components
Not everything needs a framework. A one-off import script doesn’t need Laravel. A cron job that pings three APIs and writes a report doesn’t need Symfony. Sometimes the fastest way to ship isn’t picking a framework or a CMS at all, it’s running composer require for the one library built for exactly this job, and writing forty lines around it.
Every package in this chapter is genuinely independent: no framework underneath, nothing to configure beyond the one thing it does. Several of them are worth knowing for another reason too: they’re the literal engines running inside the frameworks covered later in this book. Knowing them standalone makes the “under the hood” boxes in later chapters a lot less mysterious.