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InitPHP Container — Wiki

Welcome to the official documentation for initphp/container — a small, PSR-11 dependency injection container that resolves entries on demand and autowires class dependencies through reflection.

The package ships two public types:

Type	Purpose
Container	The concrete container; register entries and retrieve them.
Psr\Container\ContainerInterface	The PSR-11 contract Container implements; depend on this in your services.

Container implements Psr\Container\ContainerInterface, so it drops into any code that consumes the standard get() / has() contract.

composer require initphp/container

use InitPHP\Container\Container;

class Mailer {}

class UserService
{
    public function __construct(public Mailer $mailer) {}
}

$container = new Container();

// No registration needed — the container reads UserService's constructor,
// builds the Mailer dependency and injects it.
$service = $container->get(UserService::class);

$service instanceof UserService;        // true
$service->mailer instanceof Mailer;     // true

Start here

• New to the package? Read Installation, then Quick Start.
• Letting the container build your classes? See Autowiring.
• Registering values, factories or interfaces? Read Binding & Factories.
• Wondering how get / has / caching behave? Read Resolution & Caching.
• Handling failures? Read Exceptions.
• Hitting a wall? Read Limitations before filing an issue.
• Upgrading from an early dev-main snapshot? Read the Migration Guide.
• Looking for a specific method? The full API Reference lists every member.

At a glance — feature matrix

Capability	Supported
PSR-11 get() / has()	✅
Constructor autowiring (reflection)	✅
Recursive dependency resolution	✅
Lazy Closure factories	✅
Binding an interface/identifier to a class	✅
Storing arbitrary values (scalars, arrays, objects)	✅
Shared (singleton) instances	✅ (always)
Circular dependency detection	✅
Optional-dependency fallback (default / null)	✅
Union / intersection type autowiring	❌ (falls back to default / null)
Transient (per-call) instances	❌
Contextual / tagged bindings	❌
Method / property / attribute injection	❌

See Limitations for the rationale behind the unsupported rows.

Package metadata

• License: MIT
• Minimum PHP: 8.1 (also tested on 8.2, 8.3, 8.4)
• Runtime dependencies: psr/container ^2.0
• Provides: psr/container-implementation 2.0
• Packagist: initphp/container
• Source: github.com/InitPHP/Container
• Issues: github.com/InitPHP/Container/issues
• Discussions: github.com/orgs/InitPHP/discussions
• Security: SECURITY.md

If something in this wiki is unclear, ambiguous, or wrong, please open an issue — documentation fixes are reviewed eagerly.