TLDR: Phinx has moved to the Cake Software Foundation.

I’ve been busy lately. Juggling startups and open source work is no easy feat. I managed to do it for the past 5 years, but beyond 30 its proving to be more difficult. Phinx is not accelerating at the pace I’d like it to be. In fact so far this year we’ve only managed to ship 6 releases. I decided that the best strategy moving forwards is to find a new home for Phinx. One that has an active and loyal community and one that delivers great software. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve found the right fit.

Phinx will be moving to the Cake Software Foundation. As you are probably already aware they are best known for CakePHP - their rapid development framework. CakePHP has been using Phinx since 3.0.0 for database migrations and they will now be in charge of the future direction of the project. I’m thrilled that Larry and the core team have chosen to take Phinx on board and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next.

Does Anything Change?

The good news is the current way to install and update Phinx remains unchanged. You can still specify robmorgan/phinx in your composer.json files. Eventually we’ll release the cakephp/phinx package on Packagist and mark robmorgan/phinx as abandoned, but for now you don’t need to do anything.

The project itself will stay MIT-licensed but be gradually transformed into a Cake Software Foundation project. The Github project has already been moved to the CakePHP organisation.

Looking Back on the Journey

It’s been a long and challenging 5 years. Phinx is just days away from breaking 3 million downloads. We shipped more than 50 releases, added support for 4 database vendors, seeders, the change method and closed over 800 pull requests and issues. I’d especially like to thank the key maintainers Richard and Woody! I also wish Larry and the CakePHP team the best of luck - I’m sure she’s in good hands. And to the 150+ contributors - thank you for having the patience to wait an eternity to get your pull request merged or issue closed.

As for me personally, well it was a very rewarding experience getting my software into the hands of so many different people. Not to mention the great folk you meet on the conference and meetup trail. PHP truly has an awesome community and there are definitely some life long friends I’ve made that seem to like beer just as much as I do 🍺👍. I’ll continue to stick around, but I’m going to be taking a backseat for now.

Last but not least - to everyone that contributed a feature, wrote documentation, filed a bug report, advocated Phinx or chose to use it on their last project - thank you and thank you for for spreading the word! ;)

Cheers,

Rob