CodeIgniter was developed by EllisLab, an American software company. EllisLab first released CodeIgniter in 2006 as a free and open-source PHP web application framework. The intention was to create a lightweight framework that provided a simple, elegant toolkit to develop full-featured web applications. British Columbia Institute of Technology took over the project from 2014 until 2019, when it was passed on to CodeIgniter Foundation. The project is now maintained by CodeIgniter's community, with the current version at the time of writing being CodeIgniter 4.