- Is spiral/framework a Laravel package or does it integrate with Laravel?
- No. spiral/framework is a separate full-stack PHP framework, not a Laravel package, and it has no Laravel integration path; installing it is not a drop-in replacement for Laravel. Laravel teams should evaluate it either as a platform-level framework bet or as a source of individually installable PSR-compatible components. If you need Eloquent, Blade, Artisan, and the Laravel package ecosystem, stay on Laravel.
- Can I use Spiral Framework components inside an existing Laravel app?
- Yes, several components are usable standalone inside Laravel without adopting the framework, including spiral/attributes, spiral/tokenizer, spiral/filters, spiral/router, spiral/http, spiral/console, and spiral/encryption. This component mode is the most defensible way to evaluate Spiral from a Laravel codebase. Watch for Symfony coupling, such as symfony/console ^6.1 since Spiral 3.6.0, and check each package's PHP and PSR constraints before adding it.
- How do I install Spiral Framework and what PHP versions does it support?
- Full applications are typically created with the Spiral application installer (spiral/app) rather than by adding spiral/framework to an existing Laravel project. Individual components are installed with Composer. Check the require/php badge on Packagist for the exact PHP constraint of each package, because the framework and its components have their own version floors. Recent releases support doctrine/annotations 2.x, psr/http-message v2, PHPUnit 10, and Symfony Console ^6.1 or newer.
- What is RoadRunner and why does Spiral Framework need it?
- RoadRunner is a Go-based application server that keeps PHP application code in resident memory instead of bootstrapping per request under PHP-FPM. Spiral's execution model is built around that hybrid runtime, with RoadRunner handling HTTP/2, gRPC, WebSockets, queue workers, and pub/sub from a single runtime. That design is why Spiral can target long-living services, but it also means deployment and operational assumptions differ from a standard Laravel PHP-FPM setup.
- Is Spiral Framework a replacement for Laravel Octane?
- They solve an overlapping problem but are not interchangeable. Laravel Octane retrofits resident-memory execution onto Laravel, while Spiral was designed around a long-living RoadRunner runtime from the start, including a scoped DI container and bootloader model. Spiral is not a Laravel add-on and will not preserve Laravel's routing, Eloquent, Blade, Artisan, or package ecosystem, so choose it only for a hard performance or long-lived-runtime requirement you can measure.
- How does Spiral handle memory leaks in long-living PHP workers?
- Spiral's resident-memory model makes request-scoped state in singletons dangerous, because anything retained across requests can leak. The framework addresses this with a scoped dependency injection container and bootloader composition, and it advertises anti-memory-leak tooling. Treat that claim as something to verify independently in your own workload, especially after the 3.8.0 container changes, and test long-running queue and HTTP workers under realistic load.
- Can I run Spiral Framework as a sidecar service next to a Laravel monolith?
- Yes, that is often the cleanest way for a Laravel team to get Spiral's runtime profile without a rewrite. Expose the Spiral service over HTTP or gRPC and keep Laravel as the main application, moving only the bounded context that has a measured latency or throughput gap. The trade-off is one more deployable, one more runtime, and additional operational and observability overhead.
- Is Spiral Framework production-ready, and what v4 breaking changes should I plan for?
- It is a mature MIT-licensed framework with a long history, but the core is still moving at v3.x. Spiral\Boot\BootloadManager\BootloadManager has been marked deprecated and is scheduled for removal in v4.0 since 3.5.0, and the 3.8.0 container binding rewrite was classified as medium impact. Budget for a major-version migration and reconcile the release metadata, including the future-dated 2026-08-05 release and changelog topping out at 3.11.1, before committing.
- How do I test Spiral Framework applications or individual components?
- Component-level testing is straightforward because the packages are PSR-compatible and can be exercised in isolation with PHPUnit; PHPUnit 10 is supported in recent releases. For framework-level code, use the scoped container and bootloaders to isolate services and swap test doubles, and check the official docs for the current test harness. The 3.11.1 tokenizer:validate command also helps diagnose class-discovery issues that can otherwise surface only at runtime.
- Who maintains Spiral Framework and how does its ecosystem compare to Laravel's?
- Spiral is maintained by Spiral Scout, a commercial agency, which gives it coherence but creates single-vendor concentration and bus-factor risk. Its bridges are largely first-party, including roadrunner-bridge, cycle-bridge, temporal-bridge, data-grid-bridge, sapi-bridge, and nyholm-bridge, so ecosystem depth is vendor-supplied rather than community-supplied. Adoption is narrow compared with Laravel, at roughly 2,067 GitHub stars and a reported 0 dependents, so validate package maintenance and community support before a platform bet.