Application Lifecycle

Every request in a TrueFramework app follows the same six-step path: front controller → bootstrap → routing → request → handler → render. Understanding the order makes everything else click.

1. Front controller

The web server rewrites every URL to public_html/index.php. That file pulls in the framework's exception classes and then hands off to init.php in the project root:

// public_html/index.php
require '../vendor/truecastdesign/true/src/Exceptions.php';
require '../init.php';

Loading Exceptions.php directly (rather than via Composer's autoloader) means the framework's exception types are available before vendor/autoload.php runs, so any error thrown during bootstrap surfaces with the right exception class.

2. Bootstrap

init.php is where the $App object is built. The shape is:

require 'vendor/autoload.php';
define('BP', __DIR__);                    // base path

$App = new \True\App;
$App->load('site.ini');                   // app/config/site.ini

$App->request  = new \True\Request;       // wraps $_SERVER, $_GET, $_POST, php://input
$App->response = new \True\Response;
$App->router   = new \True\Router($App->request);
$App->view     = new \True\PhpView;       // .phtml renderer

// Optional — skip if you're not using Hopper
$App->db = new \Truecast\Hopper((array) $App->config->mysql);

require 'app/routes.php';

By the time routes.php runs, $App is fully assembled and configuration is loaded into $App->config as nested objects.

3. Route registration

app/routes.php declares routes by attaching them to $App->router. Routes are registered here, not matched yet:

$App->router->get('/api/users/:id', function($request) use ($App) {
    // ...
});

The default scaffold also includes a catch-all at the end that maps every unmatched URL to a controller-by-convention plus a matching .phtml view.

4. Match & dispatch

The router walks registered routes in declaration order and runs the first one whose pattern and HTTP verb match. The handler can be a closure, a path to a controller file, or any callable.

Inside a handler you have access to:

• $request — the incoming request object
• $App — the application (via use ($App) in closures)
• $request->route->{name} — captured route placeholders

5. Build a response

A handler typically does one of three things:

1. Calls $App->view->render('page.phtml', $vars) to send HTML
2. Calls $App->response($data, 'json') to send JSON
3. Calls \True\App::go($url) to redirect

6. Output

The view layer wraps your .phtml body in the configured layout (app/views/_layouts/base.phtml by default), interpolates metadata declared at the top of the file (title, description, css, js), and writes the response.