Welcome to PHP Rules

PHP Rules is a lightweight, forward-chaining inference engine based on the "Rule Archetype Pattern" described in the excellent book Enterprise Patterns and MDA: Building Better Software with Archetype Patterns and UML.

What is PHP Rules?

PHP Rules is a rule engine that models formal propositional logic. It allows you to separate conditional logic from source code and database triggers in a reusable package, where explicit rules can be independently defined & managed.

What are Rules?

Rules are simple statements of fact about the state of something that may be used explicitly to trigger actions.

Rules are defined & stored in text files with RUL extension. They define

• Propositions: statements with Boolean truth values
• Variables: symbols that represent the value of something
• Operators: Boolean operators or quantifier operators

RuleContexts are facts, stored in text files, databases, etc., that provide the informational context for the execution of Rule. Rules evaluate RuleContexts, returning a Boolean value that tells us whether a given set of facts conform to the defined Rule.

Rule Package Class Diagram

PHP Rule Engine In Action: View Examples of Rule Execution

In the two examples below, we load & execute Rules by fetching the Rule & RuleContext from

1. Text files alone, and
2. Text files with SQL statements, which are executed by the SqlFileLoaderStrategy, i.e., the results of SQL statements build Propositions & Variables.

• Execute the text file example
• Execute the relational database example

Download & Install

Download rules.zip and unzip to your apache root directory, e.g., htdocs.

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