Tanuki: Lightweight PHP MVC Framework Built for Developers Who Prefer Simplicity

A developer has released Tanuki, a lightweight PHP MVC framework designed to sit between bare raw PHP and heavyweight frameworks like Laravel or Symfony. The framework provides core plumbing — routing, PDO-based models, plain PHP views, session handling, and CSRF protection — without an ORM, template engine, or dependency injection container. Routing is defined as a simple array, and the entire request lifecycle can be read through in roughly ten minutes. The repository ships with a working to-do app as a reference, along with two optional extensions for session-based authentication and a Django-style admin panel that remain inactive until explicitly wired in. Tanuki targets developers who prefer writing SQL directly and want a readable MVC skeleton without framework-imposed abstractions.