ProxyManager LTS

friendsofphp/proxy-manager-lts is a maintained fork of the widely-used ocramius/proxy-manager library, created to keep proxy-generation support alive across a wider range of PHP versions after the original became largely unmaintained. It generates virtual proxies, lazy-loading proxies, and other AOP-style proxy objects for PHP classes at runtime, and is used internally by major frameworks such as Symfony (via symfony/dependency-injection lazy services) and Doctrine ORM for lazy entity loading. It ships as a drop-in replace for ocramius/proxy-manager in Composer, so existing code depending on the original package continues to work unmodified.

What You Get

• Runtime code generation for virtual proxies, lazy-loading proxies, and null object proxies via ProxyGenerator classes
• A Configuration class controlling proxy autoloading, caching, and generation strategy
• Multiple GeneratorStrategy implementations (eval-based, file-writer-based) for different proxy-caching needs
• Drop-in Composer compatibility with ocramius/proxy-manager via the replace directive, requiring no code changes to adopt
• Continued support for PHP >=7.1, avoiding forced upgrades for projects still on older PHP versions

Common Use Cases

• Powering Doctrine ORM’s lazy entity loading, where proxy objects defer database fetches until a property is accessed
• Enabling Symfony’s lazy services feature, where a service’s real constructor only runs on first method call
• Building custom AOP-style proxies for logging, caching, or access control around arbitrary PHP classes
• Keeping legacy applications on older, unmaintained PHP versions working with modern DI containers that expect proxy-manager

Under The Hood

Architecture - The library’s core is a proxy-generation pipeline under src/ProxyManager/: ProxyGenerator/ classes build the AST/source for each proxy type (virtual, lazy-loading, ghost, etc.), Generator/ and GeneratorStrategy/ handle turning that into loadable PHP code (via eval or a file-writer strategy), FileLocator/ and Autoloader/ manage locating and autoloading generated proxy classes, and Signature/ computes cache-invalidation signatures so regenerated proxies match the source class shape. Tech Stack - PHP >=7.1 with laminas/laminas-code (for AST-level code generation) and symfony/filesystem as runtime dependencies, managed via Composer with minimum-stability: dev reflecting its incremental-fork nature, and symfony/phpunit-bridge for testing. Code Quality - The tests/ProxyManagerTest/ directory mirrors the src/ structure closely (Signature/, FileLocator/, ProxyGenerator/, Generator/, GeneratorStrategy/, Factory/, Autoloader/, plus a Functional/ suite for end-to-end proxy generation), indicating deliberate per-component coverage inherited from the original well-tested upstream project. API Design - As a conservative fork, the public API intentionally mirrors ocramius/proxy-manager exactly (same ProxyManager\ namespace, same Configuration/Factory classes) so downstream consumers like Symfony and Doctrine require zero code changes — the value here is entirely in maintenance continuity, not API redesign.