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Loxodontu is an open-source Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) built with modern PHP. Designed as a lightweight, self-hostable alternative to Supabase and Firebase, it provides developers with instant APIs, database management, and essential backend infrastructure right out of the box — leveraging the speed, simplicity, and ecosystem of PHP 8+.
Early development
Just started, no stable release yet, expect things to change.
What you get¶
- Management API — auth, projects, tables, API keys, and RLS policies.
- REST passthrough — an instant, token-authenticated REST API in front of your tables.
- Row-Level Security (RLS) — policies are raw SQL boolean expressions (real
WHERE/WITH CHECKpower, not a fixed condition DSL), enforced transparently at the REST layer. - Storage — per-project file buckets with the same RLS-style policies, upload/download/delete via the API or the dashboard's file browser.
- Project-level auth — a project's own end users, separate from platform accounts.
- Edge functions — project-scoped PHP functions exposed over HTTP, sandboxed for shared hosting.
- Cron jobs — scheduled, retryable jobs driven by a single
worker.phpentry point.
New here? Start with Getting Started to run Loxodontu locally in a few minutes. Read Philosophy for why the project is built this way, or jump straight into the API Overview. Deploying to shared hosting? See Deployment. Building a frontend? See Clients for the official JS/TS SDK.
Built with¶
Loxodontu's core is three small, independent PHP libraries, also open-source:
- Erlenmeyer — the HTTP layer: routing, requests, responses, and middleware.
- pdo-restify — turns a PDO connection into a REST API; powers REST passthrough.
- fullcrawl — the migration runner used to manage the database schema (see Getting Started).
Each one is usable on its own, outside of Loxodontu, in any PHP project.
Clients¶
- @adaiasmagdiel/loxodontu (source) — the official JavaScript/TypeScript client, for both browsers and Node. See Clients.