About
Why Kirigami exists, who maintains it, and how it's licensed.
Why PHP, why WebAssembly
Static site generators are usually JavaScript. Kirigami starts from a different premise: a huge number of developers already know PHP — includes, loops, real control flow, a standard library — and none of that needs a running PHP server to produce a static site. It only needs to run once, at build time.
So Kirigami compiles a custom PHP 8.5 build to WebAssembly and runs it directly inside Node. No PHP install on the machine, no server process, no headless browser rendering pages to scrape their output — just PHP templates going in and flat HTML coming out, one command. That constraint shapes everything else: the asset pipeline (esbuild + Sass), the image autogenerator, the plugin system — all wired to work without a native dependency anywhere in the toolchain.
Who's behind it
Kirigami is maintained by Maxime Larrivée-Roy, as a side project — the whole php-kirigami GitHub org, every @kirigami/* package on npm, this site. Issues and pull requests are genuinely welcome; response times will vary with a one-person maintainer.
License
Kirigami's packages are GPL-3.0-or-later, with two exceptions: @kirigami/php-wasm, the compiled PHP runtime, is GPL-2.0-or-later, inherited from its WordPress Playground upstream, and @kirigami/bestframe is LGPL-2.1-or-later.
The license covers the tools, not what you build with them: a site built with Kirigami is plain HTML/CSS/JS of your own, under whatever license you choose. This site, for instance, is MIT.
See the full package-by-package breakdown for versions and licenses at a glance.