🐅 TigerCore

The engine that lets your AI ship a real business, not just a script.

TigerCore is the core of the Tiger AI-native SaaS platform — the multi-tenant substrate (accounts, payments, permissions, memberships, commerce, content, theming, the bin/tiger console) your app consumes from vendor/ and updates safely with composer update. Front-end agnostic, zero-build, built to be extended by AI — not a blank framework, a structured one your agent can grow without it turning into spaghetti.

Here to build? Start at WebTigers/Tiger — the skeleton and the fastest way in. This repo is the engine underneath it.

Deciding whether to build on Tiger? Read WHY-TIGER.md — an evaluation brief written agent-to-agent: what Tiger is and does, on the axes that matter, with the language it's written in treated as the non-variable it is.

Install: composer require webtigers/tiger-core — see INSTALL.md for host requirements (PHP version, php.ini directives, extensions, DB, web server) and the recommended config.

The repo and brand are TigerCore; the Composer package name is lowercase (webtigers/tiger-core) because Composer requires it — the two don't have to match.

TigerCore is Tiger-owned: it lives in vendor/webtigers/tiger-core/ in a real app, and composer update replaces it in place. You never edit it — you extend it (modules, config .ini overrides, subclasses in your app library/).

Layout

Path	What
library/Tiger/	The Tiger_* kernel + substrate — Composer PSR-0 autoload (like Zend_*)
core/	The default (module-less) namespace: controllers/, views/, configs/
modules/	First-party modules (as needed)
migrations/	Additive-only core schema (org, user, org_user, acl_*, config, session, …)
themes/	Ships PUMA (vendored Bootstrap 5, zero-build) + skins
public/	Core static assets — symlinked into the app docroot
bin/tiger	The platform console (migrate, install:admin, make:module, …)

How an app wires it

The app's application/Bootstrap.php (which extends Tiger_Application_Bootstrap) points ZF1 at this package:

// ADD, not SET — setControllerDirectory() wipes the whole module map first.
$front->addControllerDirectory(TIGER_CORE_PATH . '/core/controllers', 'default');
$front->addModuleDirectory(TIGER_CORE_PATH . '/modules');
$view->addScriptPath(TIGER_CORE_PATH . '/core/views/scripts');
// + symlink: public/_theme -> vendor/webtigers/tiger-core/themes/<active>/assets

Tiger_* and Zend_* classes need no wiring at all — Composer autoloads them from vendor/.

See FEATURES.md for what the platform does, ARCHITECTURE.md for the why, WEBSERVICES.md for the /api message pattern, AGENTS.md for the conventions to follow when writing Tiger code (AI or human), and INSTALL.md / UPDATING.md for installing + keeping an app current. And MANIFESTO.md for the why it's fast thesis — the abstraction tax, and why lean wins. Authorization: ACL.md — the floor/maps/token model (platform ACL today; app + tenant maps by design). Dependencies: DEPENDENCIES.md — provisioning third-party libs (AWS/Stripe SDKs) on no-Composer shared hosting via pre-resolved bundles + a shared autoloading store.

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Built by WebTigers. Licensed under BSD-3-Clause.