Lumen is a PHP micro-framework built to deliver microservices and blazing fast APIs. Learn how to build and secure RESTful APIs with Lumen.

Lumen is an open-source PHP micro-framework created by Taylor Otwell as an alternative to Laravel to meet the demand of lightweight installations that are faster than existing PHP micro-frameworks such as Slim and Silex. With Lumen, you can build lightning-fast microservices and APIs that can support your Laravel applications.

Lumen Features and Architecture

Lumen utilizes the Illuminate components that power the Laravel framework. As such, Lumen is built to painlessly upgrade directly to Laravel when needed; for example, when you discover that you need more features out of the box than what Lumen offers.

These are some of the built-in features of Lumen:

• Routing is provided out of the box in Lumen. This includes basic routing, routing parameters, named routes, and route groups such as middleware.

• Authentication does not support session state. However, incoming requests are authenticated via stateless mechanisms such as tokens.

• Caching is implemented the same as in Laravel. Cache drivers such as Database, Memcached, and Redis are supported. For example, you can install the illuminate/redis package via Composer to use a Redis cache with Lumen.

• Errors and Logging are implemented via the Monolog library, which provides support for various log handlers.

• Queuing services are similar to the ones offered by Laravel. A unified API is provided across a variety of different queue back-ends.

• Events provide a simple observer implementation that allows you to subscribe and listen for events in your application.

• Bootstrapping processes are located in a single file.