// the find
laravel/lumen
The Laravel Lumen Framework.
Lumen is Laravel's stripped-down micro-framework for building JSON APIs and microservices — same Eloquent ORM and routing conventions, but without the session handling, views, and other full-stack overhead. It was the answer to 'I need Laravel but faster' circa 2015–2019. That answer is now outdated.
Familiar Laravel conventions mean any Laravel developer can read and write Lumen code on day one. Boot time and memory footprint are measurably lower than full Laravel for pure API work. The Eloquent ORM is still available with no trade-offs, so your DB layer is unchanged. Routing is extremely fast for simple endpoint-heavy services.
The project's own README tells you not to use it for new projects — that's a bad sign. Laravel Octane (which keeps a full Laravel app in memory across requests) eliminates the performance justification that made Lumen worth the trade-offs. Last pushed April 2024, and activity has been minimal for years; this is a framework on life support. You lose a large chunk of the Laravel ecosystem — packages that assume full Laravel won't work without shimming, which quietly creates upgrade friction over time.