📢 Announcement: Sentinel is now HKM Kernel

[hakeemRash]

📢 Announcement: Sentinel is now HKM Kernel

Hey everyone,

Quick but important update: we've renamed this framework from Sentinel to HKM Kernel.

We found out "Sentinel" was already taken by another project, so we made the switch early to avoid confusion (and any trademark headaches) down the line. The internal security core component is still affectionately called "Sentinel" under the hood — you'll see it referenced in the CLI banner and some internals — but the framework and project name going forward is HKM Kernel.

All links, docs, and releases are updated to reflect the new name. Thanks for your patience during the transition!

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For anyone new here — what is HKM Kernel?

HKM Kernel is a modular PHP 8.4+ service framework built on what we call Gated Demand Architecture (GDA).

Most frameworks boot everything, then decide what to do with the request. We flipped that:

• 🛡️ Security before everything — a SecurityGateway runs before any module loads. A denied request costs zero module wiring.
• 📦 Load only what's needed — only the modules required for this route get registered, resolved from a per-request dependency graph.
• 🧱 One module, one domain — enforced at runtime, not just convention. Cross-module internal access throws a ScopeViolationException.
• 🔌 Infrastructure independence — the kernel defines port interfaces; you supply the implementation (MySQL, Redis, S3, etc.), so swapping infra never touches domain code.
• 📝 Explicit over implicit — routes, config, dependencies, and emitted events are all declared in module.json. Nothing is auto-discovered at runtime.

It ships as a native cross-platform CLI (hkm), built with Zig — install and upgrade it like a Go/Rust binary, no Composer needed to get started.

Batteries included: JWT/PAT auth, a native OAuth 2.1 + OIDC server, multi-tenancy, a validation engine (~45 built-in rules), mail, storage (local/S3), sessions, i18n, and more.

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Where to start

• 📖 README — full architecture walkthrough, install steps, and a complete end-to-end feature example
• 🚀 Releases — latest build
• 🤝 CONTRIBUTING.md — if you'd like to get involved

We're a small team (2 of us) building this in the open, so feedback — including blunt, critical feedback on the architecture — is genuinely welcome. Drop questions or thoughts below 👇