The need was straightforward: share large files — tens of gigabytes of raw footage, project archives, training videos — without going through a third-party cloud. No Google Drive, no WeTransfer, no Dropbox. A dedicated server, files you control, links that expire when you want them to. The result: ShareBox, a self-hosted file sharing platform with integrated video streaming, written in pure PHP 8.1 with no framework.
The repo is on GitHub.
Zero runtime dependencies
The first decision — and the most consequential — was to avoid any framework. No Symfony, no Laravel. Pure PHP, native stdlib, SQLite auto-created on first boot. Composer is present, but only as a dev dependency for PHPUnit. In production, no vendor/ directory is needed.
This constraint is clarifying. Every feature must justify its real implementation cost — not outsourced to a package that does ten times what you need. Manual routing in a few dozen lines, native PHP session handling, SQLite queries via PDO: these are things you implement once and understand completely.
