Free, open, and yours to extend.
Tiger is BSD-licensed and built on TigerZF (ZendFramework 1, modernized for PHP 8.1–8.5). No license fee, no lock-in, no black boxes — clone it, extend it with modules, and own your stack top to bottom.
Built to be built on
Extend by adding, never by patching. Your code lives outside the framework, so
composer update can never clobber it.
Everything is a module
Drop a folder in application/modules and it plugs in — controllers, an /api service, models, migrations, views, ACL, routes. No core edits, ever.
One message-based /api
No REST-by-URL zoo. The message names a service + method; add a method and it's live. The pattern even describes itself as OpenAPI.
A real CLI
make:module scaffolds a live feature; migrate, install:admin, and crypto/secret rotation are built in. No hidden magic to reverse-engineer.
Docs in the code
Docblocks generate the API reference; an AGENTS.md documents the conventions. The codebase is written to be read — by humans and AIs.
Permissive license
BSD-3-Clause — build commercial products on it, ship closed-source modules, no copyleft
strings. The framework is a dependency in vendor/, never copied into your app.
Self-host anywhere
cPanel, a $5 VPS, or a fleet behind a load balancer — zero build step, no vendor cloud required. Your data and your deploy stay yours.
Contribute & share
Open issues and PRs on GitHub, or publish your own modules and themes — the same registry and one-click Module Manager everyone else installs from.
Clone it and make it yours
One command scaffolds a running app you fully control — then extend it with a module.
$ cd my-app && vendor/bin/tiger make:module hello