Tech Stack

Stack Overview

The current motmaina platform uses a mixed stack:

a PHP monolith for the main website application
MySQL as the primary relational database
Nginx and PHP-FPM for web serving in development
Docker Compose for local environment orchestration
Astro Starlight for documentation

This is a pragmatic production-oriented stack rather than a modern SPA plus API-only architecture.

1. Application Runtime

The main application runtime is:

PHP 7.4
CodeIgniter-based application structure
Composer autoloading

The project composer.json also confirms:

platform target locked to PHP 7.4
sentry/sentry as a Composer-managed runtime dependency

2. Framework and Application Structure

The website is built on:

CodeIgniter
HMVC-style modular extension through MX_Controller
custom framework extensions under application/core

The application is organized in classic CodeIgniter layers plus modules:

application/config
application/core
application/helpers
application/libraries
application/models
application/views
application/modules

The main modules currently visible are:

site
customer
api
acp

This means the stack is structured as a modular PHP monolith rather than split across separate deployable apps.

3. Web Server Layer

The provided development environment uses:

Nginx 1.27-alpine
PHP-FPM

The Nginx setup performs:

request rewriting to index.php
static asset serving
PHP request forwarding to the PHP container

This is a standard server-rendered PHP deployment pattern.

4. Database Layer

The primary database is:

MySQL 8.0

The application uses:

mysqli
pdo_mysql

The schema is broad and supports:

content publishing
customer identity
appointments
consultations
courses and subscriptions
notifications
admin RBAC
payments and integrations

5. PHP Extensions and System Libraries

The Dockerfile shows the runtime depends on these PHP extensions:

mysqli
pdo_mysql
mbstring
intl
zip
gd

It also installs supporting system packages for:

image handling
archive support
internationalization
font and graphic processing dependencies

This is important because several platform features rely on media, multilingual content, file handling, and reporting workflows.

6. Development Infrastructure

The repository includes a Docker-based development setup using:

docker-compose.dev.yml
a custom PHP 7.4 FPM image
an Nginx container
a MySQL container

The default local development entry points are:

website on port 8080
MySQL on port 3307

This means the intended local stack is containerized, even though the app can also run on a manually configured host environment.

7. Documentation Stack

The docs application uses:

Astro 5.6.1
Starlight 0.37.7
Markdown and MDX
Sharp 0.34.2

This docs stack is separate from the website runtime itself and is used to document product, routes, architecture, and database behavior.

8. Legacy and In-Repo Third-Party Libraries

Beyond Composer, the main application also contains in-repo third-party packages under application/third_party, including:

Google API PHP Client
PHPMailer
PHPExcel
MX HMVC extension classes

It also contains internal libraries under application/libraries, including support for:

payment gateways such as Hyperpay and Tabby
PDF generation
QR code generation
Google-related integrations
mail handling

This indicates the stack is partly modernized through Composer, but still heavily dependent on legacy in-repo library management patterns.

9. Operational and Business Integrations

The codebase and migrations indicate integration with several business-facing systems and workflows:

Sentry for monitoring
payment processing
email delivery
notification templates
Google services
healthcare and consultation workflow handling

These are part of the practical platform stack even though they are not all represented as top-level infrastructure services in Docker.

10. Documentation-Level Summary

At a high level, the tech stack can be described as:

backend-rendered PHP web application
CodeIgniter plus HMVC modular structure
MySQL relational database
Nginx plus PHP-FPM serving model
Docker Compose for local setup
Astro Starlight for project documentation

Why This Matters

This stack explains several characteristics of the current system:

tight coupling between routes, views, and business logic
strong dependence on server-side rendering and request rewriting
shared database ownership across many business domains
incremental growth through migrations and in-repo libraries
documentation maintained in a separate modern toolchain

For contributors, this means work on the platform often spans both legacy PHP conventions and newer documentation and tooling practices.