Installation

Requirements

PHP 8.1

Phalcon requires PHP 8.1 or above.

Although PHP 8.1 was released several years ago and its active support as well as security updates have expired, Phalcon still supports it, in order to offer enough time for developers to upgrade their applications.

PDO

Since Phalcon is loosely coupled, it exposes functionality without the need for additional extensions. However, certain components rely on additional extensions to work. When in need of database connectivity and access, you will need to install the php_pdo extension. If your RDBMS is MySQL/MariaDB or Aurora, you will need the php_mysqlnd extension also. Similarly, using a PostgreSql database with Phalcon requires the php_pgsql extension.

Hardware

Phalcon is designed to use as few resources as possible while offering high performance. Although we have tested Phalcon in various high-end environments, (such as 0.25GB RAM, 0.5 CPU), the hardware that you will choose will depend on your application needs.

We have hosted our website and blog for the last few years on an Amazon VM with 512MB RAM and 1 vCPU.

Software

Along with PHP 8.1 or greater, depending on your application needs and the Phalcon components you need, you might need to install the following extensions:

• curl
• fileinfo
• gettext
• gd2 (to use the Phalcon\Image\Adapter\Gd class)
• imagick (to use the Phalcon\Image\Adapter\Imagick class)
• json
• PDO Extension as well as the relevant RDBMS-specific extension (i.e. MySQL, PostgreSql, etc.)
• OpenSSL Extension
• Mbstring Extension
• Memcached or other relevant cache adapters depending on your usage of cache

Installation

Phalcon is distributed as a PHP package. Install it in your project with Composer:

composer require phalcon/phalcon

Composer adds Phalcon to your composer.json and loads its classes through the Composer autoloader. There is no PHP extension to compile or enable.