Cache File Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Cache backend selection for the roadmap. If you are shipping a PHP service that needs a cache layer but cannot assume Redis/Memcached is provisioned, a file-backed PSR-16 handler lets you ship caching on day one with zero infrastructure dependencies. This directly informs whether "caching" is a v1 feature or a v2 feature gated on ops work.
• Build vs. buy for internal cache adapters. Any team that has written (or is about to write) its own FileCache class behind a Psr\SimpleCache\CacheInterface should evaluate this instead. The build cost is small but the maintenance and edge-case surface (TTL expiry, atomic writes, path sanitization, concurrency) is repetitive and easy to get subtly wrong.
• Framework-agnostic library strategy. This package is only useful to a Laravel codebase as a transitively interesting dependency — Laravel already ships a file cache driver. Its real product value is in shared libraries that must not depend on a framework's cache contract. That distinction should drive whether it enters your dependency graph at all.
• Multi-tenant / per-instance isolation decisions. File caches scope naturally to a filesystem path, so this supports decisions about whether cached artifacts are per-deployment, per-tenant, or per-container — useful for on-prem and self-hosted SKUs where you cannot mandate a shared cache service.
• Deployment topology assumptions. Choosing a file cache is an implicit product commitment to single-node or shared-storage deployments. If the roadmap includes horizontal scaling, autoscaling ephemeral containers, or multi-region, this decision needs to be flagged and revisited.
• License and compliance clearance. BSD-3-Clause is permissive and commercially safe, so it passes the usual OSS review without legal escalation — a small but real accelerator for adoption.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt when:

• You are on Yii3 (or otherwise already consuming yiisoft/cache and the Yii DI/config conventions) and want a filesystem handler that matches the ecosystem's interfaces.
• Your cache consumer is written against PSR-16 (psr/simple-cache) and you need a concrete handler for local development, CI, single-server production, or air-gapped/on-prem environments.
• Your operational constraint is "no new infrastructure." Shared hosting, appliance-style deployments, and customer-managed installs frequently cannot run Redis. A file handler is the pragmatic answer.
• Your workload is read-heavy with modest write volume, tolerates per-node cache incoherence, and can accept filesystem latency.
• You need a low-ceremony default that a developer can instantiate in three lines without configuring a connection string, serializer, or cluster topology.

Look elsewhere when:

• You are on Laravel or Symfony. Both ship first-party file cache drivers with framework-integrated configuration, tags, locking, and console tooling. Adding a Yii package here is friction with no payoff.
• You need distributed consistency — multiple app servers, cache invalidation across nodes, or cache-as-a-source-of-truth semantics. Use Redis or Memcached.
• You need high write throughput or large value sizes. File caches contend on inode and disk I/O and degrade sharply under concurrent writes.
• You need advanced cache semantics — tag-based invalidation, atomic locks, stampede protection. PSR-16 gives you flat get/set/delete only.
• Maintenance risk is unacceptable. Thirteen stars and a single-organisation maintenance model means the bus factor is effectively one team. If this is a load-bearing production dependency, be explicit that you are accepting that risk or plan to vendor/fork it.
• Your container filesystem is ephemeral. A file cache in an autoscaled pod is a cache that evaporates on every deploy — acceptable for warm-up only, not for a designed caching tier.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives (one paragraph): We evaluated a small open-source caching component from the Yii project that stores cached data on the local disk instead of in a separate caching server. It is permissively licensed and free, and it lets us add caching to a service without buying or operating any additional infrastructure — which matters for on-premises and customer-hosted deployments where we cannot assume a Redis server exists. The trade-off is scope: it only works well when we run on a single server or shared storage, it does not keep caches consistent across multiple servers, and it is maintained by a very small community, so we would treat it as a low-risk convenience rather than a strategic platform bet. Recommendation: adopt only where we are already in the Yii ecosystem or where a framework-neutral cache is required; for our Laravel services, use the built-in driver.

For engineering: This is a PSR-16 file handler for yiisoft/cache. It buys us a standards-compliant CacheInterface implementation with no external services, no connection management, and BSD-3 licensing. It does not buy us tags, locks, atomic multi-key operations, or cross-node coherence — those are out of scope by design. If we adopt it, we should (a) depend on the PSR-16 interface rather than the concrete class so the handler is swappable for Redis later, (b) pin the version and pin the cache directory outside the deploy artifact path, and (c) keep our own thin adapter so a fork or replacement is a one-file change. Expect to own the edge cases — TTL expiry and concurrent-write behaviour are ours to validate under load, not theirs.