I built a PHP AI agent library with zero dependencies - here's the code

If you've tried to add an LLM agent to a PHP application, you've probably hit the same wall: every serious library is Python. So the "obvious" answer is to bolt a Python microservice behind your PHP app a sidecar that speaks to your agent, your agent speaks to your APIs, and now you're maintaining two runtimes, two deployments, and a network hop you didn't ask for.

I got tired of that. So I built NanoAgent: a PHP library that does agents natively. One composer require. Zero runtime dependencies. No Python. No framework. No DSL.

composer require hammrouni/nanoagent

What it does

One config array, any provider. OpenAI, Groq, Anthropic, DeepSeek, OpenRouter or a local model behind any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (Ollama, llama.cpp server). Swap with one line.
Tool-first. You map plain PHP functions as tools. Your agent can query your database, hit your internal APIs, read your device telemetry the code you already wrote.
MCP support. Register any Model Context Protocol server (Streamable HTTP); its tools behave exactly like local ones, with an allowlist so you control what gets registered.
Persistent memory. Conversations survive across requests via pluggable drivers: JSON files, SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL or your own.
Minimal footprint. One package, no hidden magic. You can audit the whole thing in an afternoon (it's small on purpose).

The 30-second tour

<?php use NanoAgent\Agent; $agent = new Agent(llm: [ 'provider' => 'groq', 'model' => 'llama-3.3-70b-versatile', 'api_key' => getenv('GROQ_API_KEY'), // 'base_url' => 'http://localhost:8080/v1', // …or a local model server ]); // Your plain PHP function, now a tool: $agent->tool('weather', fn (string $city) => "It is 22°C in {$city}."); echo $agent->chat('How warm is it in Marrakech?');

That's it. The agent decides to call weather, your function runs in-process, the result comes back, and the reply is generated. No sidecar, no queue, no second language.

Why PHP, really?

Because a huge amount of production AI isn't greenfield. It's Laravel services talking to legacy databases, internal HTTP APIs, and ten years of business logic. The agent that's useful there is not a shiny framework it's a boring, local library that lives inside the process you already run. NanoAgent is deliberately boring. Boring is the feature.

What I'm not doing

No auto-generated prompts, no "magic" abstractions, no 14 dependencies. If you want a framework, there are great ones. If you want a library you can read end-to-end, point at a hosted API or a model on your own hardware, and ship in an afternoon that's what this is.