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Composer Preload Plugin

Preload your code to opcache with a composer command to make your code run faster.

Composer Preload is a Composer plugin that aims to provide and complement PHP opcache warming.
This plugin introduces a new composer preload command that can generate a vendor/preload.php file (after vendor/autoload.php pattern) that contains calls to warm up the opcache cache.

How it works

Currently, this plugin recursively scans for .php files in the given paths and creates a file that calls
opcache_compile_file or require_once functions, depending on the mechanism selected in the configuration.

Installation

You can install this plugin the same way you'd install a normal composer package:

If you would rather install this globally:

Configuration

1: Edit your composer.json file and create a section called extra if it doesn't already exist. Here is an
example:

The extra.preload directive contains all the configuration options for this plugin. The paths directive must be an array of directories relative to the composer.json file. These directories will be scanned recursively for .php files, converted to absolute paths, and appended to the vendor/preload.php file.

2: Run the composer preload command.

3: Execute the generated vendor/preload.php file. You can either run php vendor/preload.php or use your web server
to execute it. See the Preloading section below for more information.

Configuration options

extra.preload.paths : Required

An array of directory paths to look for .php files in. This setting is required as of now. The directories must exist at the time composer preload command is run.

extra.preload.exclude : Optional

An array of directory paths to exclude from the preload.php. This list must be relative to the composer.json file, similar to the paths directive. The ideal use case limiting the scope of the paths directive.

extra.preload.extensions : Optional, Default: ["php"]

An array of file extensions to search for. If not entered, it will search for all .php files.
Do not enter the proceeding period (.) character. The example above is suitable for Drupal. For Symfony/Laravel projects, you can leave the default option ["php"] or just not use this option so it defaults to just .php.

extra.preload.exclude-regex : Optional

Specify an array of PCRE-compatible full regular expressions (including delimiters and modifiers) to be matched against the full path and, if matched, excluded from the preload list. This can help you exclude tests from the preload list.

For example, to exclude all PHPUnit-akin tests, you can use the regular expression

This will make sure the file name ends with "test.php", but also has an alphanumeric or underscore prefix. This is a common pattern of PHPUnit tests. The /i modifier makes the match case insensitive.

For directory separators, always use Unix-style forward slashes (/) even if you are on a Windows system that uses backwards slashes (\). Don't forget to properly escape the regex pattern to work within JSON syntax; e.g escape slashes (\ and /) with a backwards slash (\ -> \\ and / -> \/).

This will make the regular expression hard to read, but ¯\(ツ)/¯.

extra.preload.no-status-check: Optional, Default: false

If this setting is set to true (you can also pass the --no-status-check command line option), the generated preload.php file will not include any additional checks to ensure that opcache is enabled. This setting is disabled by default, and the generated preload.php file will contain a small snippet at the top to indicate that opcache is not enabled.

extra.preload.files : Optional

An array of individual files to include. This setting is optional. The files must exist at the time the composer preload command is executed.

extra.preload.mechanism: Optional, Default: compile

By default, the Preloader will upload the files to Opcache using opcache_compile_file(). This avoids executing any file in your project, but no links (traits, interfaces, extended classes, ...) will be resolved from the files compiled. You may have some warnings of unresolved links when preloading (nothing too dangerous).

You can change this using useRequire(), which changes to require_once, along the path the Composer Autoloader (usually at vendor/autoload.php) to resolve the links.

Preloading

To do the actual preloading, run vendor/preload.php.

If you have opcache enabled for CLI applications, you can call php vendor/preload.php directly to preload the generated PHP file and warm up the cache inmediatly.

In a webserver context once generated, tell PHP to use this file as a preloader at start up in your php.ini.

Once the script is generated, you're encouraged to restart your PHP process (or server, in some cases) to pick up the generated preload script. Only generating the script is not enough.

FAQ

What does this plugin even do?

This plugin can create a new file at vendor/preload.php that follows the pattern of Composer's autoloader at
vendor/autoload.php.

This new preload.php file contains several function calls that compiles PHP files and cache them into PHP's opcache. PHP Opcache is a shared memory (with optional file storage option) feature in PHP that can hold compiled PHP files, so the same file doesn't need to be compiled again and again when its called.

This is a persistent memory until PHP is restarted or the cache is eventually flushed.

Caching files in opcache has siginificant performance benefits for the cost of memory.

So all the files are loaded all the time?

All the files are loaded into Opcache. This is not same as you include() or require() a class, which makes
PHP actually execute the code. When you cache code to Opcache, those classes are not executed - just their compiled code is cached to the memory.

For example, if you declare a variable, this plugin's preload functionality will not make the variables available inside your PHP code. You still have to include the file to make them available.

You can use the require mechanism to use require_once function instead opcache_compile_file to require and execute the files as mechanism to populate the opcache,

I have the vendor/preload.php file. What now?

After generating the file, you might need to actually run it effectively load the files to Opcache. Ideally, you should do this every time you restart your web server or PHP server, depending on how you serve PHP within your web server.

From PHP 7.4 the php.ini has the option opcache.preload that let you specify this generated file, or a separate file that calls all vendor/preload.php files you have across your server to actively warm up the cache.

Roadmap

• ☐ Extend extras.preload section to configure the packages that should be preloaded instead of setting the individual paths.
• ☐ Progress bar to show the file generation progress
• ☐ Flag to generate the file and run it, so the cache is immediately warmed up.
• ☐ Fancier progress bar.
• ⭕ Full test coverage.
• ☐ Even fancier progress bar with opcache memory usage display, etc.
• ⭕ Get many GitHub stars