One of the big features arriving with PHP 5.4 is the addition of a built-in basic webserver for use in development environments. Quite a few of the other scripting languages have something like this so I'm very pleased to see it in PHP. Using a server like this makes it easy to quickly try out some scripts without needing to configure apache or really do anything much! I had to look up a few things to get started, so I thought I'd write them down for posterity.

She includes instructions on how to get the server up and running from the command line, updating the location of the document root with a command line option and using a simple "routing.php" script to act as a front controller. Changing the hostname is as simple as changing "localhost" to something else when starting the server.

The problem with the new PHP 5.4 internal web-server is that it isn't Apache. Thus it does not know anything about .htaccess. Even when you have defined your .htaccess to do authentication, the internal PHP web-server will ignore it, while in production, the authentication will be needed (if you will be running Apache, of course). Also, you need to reroute everything manually through your app_dev.php, so your URL's don't really match the way they will be on your production.

He introduces the PHP web server quickly, just showing a sample command line call to start it up and to point it at a certain PHP file as a "boostrap". With the help of his htrouter script, though, you can use "modules" similar to those in Apache. He already has the HTTP auth stuff working and more is to come.

This is another wonderful setup that I've found myself using rather than the traditional Apache & mod_php setup. [...] Ngnix, unlike Apache, doesn't actually load PHP. Instead, it hands it off as a proxy to a "php handler" which acts like an Application Server. So nginx by itself won't serve PHP files, but just static files.

He briefly introduces Nginx and PHP-FPM for those not familiar and points out that this combination is very fast, even without much configuration. The packages are installed with the aptitude installer and minimal changes are made to the php-fm and nginx configuration files (mostly to set up whatever your domain/virtual host is).

Yet another new feature to look forward to in PHP 5.4.0 - the CLI SAPI will now provide a built-in web server which is geared toward developmental purposes. It shouldn't be used in production right now.

The PHP manual has been updated with the latest on this upcoming feature:

URI requests are served from the current working directory where PHP was started, unless the -t option is used to specify an explicit document root. [...] If a PHP file is given on the command line when the web server is started it is treated as a "router" script for the web server. The script is run at the start of each HTTP request. If this script returns FALSE, then the requested resource is returned as-is. Otherwise the script's output is returned to the browser.

The PHP 5.4.x series is still in beta as of the time of this post - you can download the beta1 on the downloads section of the PHP site (or the Windows binaries).

Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, virtual hosts, authentication, on the fly encoding, load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more. This tutorial shows how you can install Cherokee on an Ubuntu 11.04 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

The tutorial makes use of the package manager (apt-get) to install the needed software, so don't look for complete compiling information from this process. They include a bit of the configuration of the Cherokee installation and how you enable PHP support via its interface. Screenshots of the Cherokee interface are included to help make it easier to follow along.

PHP is going to come with a built-in Web server, so you will no longer need Apache or any other Web server software to run PHP applications. This is the main topic discussed by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert in the episode 10 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

They also talk about some security fixes and the PHP.js project. As usual, you can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

There are a lot of talks today about "Built-in web server" [for PHP] RFC by Moriyoshi Koizumi. There is a nice discussion on Hacker News (and 2 threads on reddit: here and here). So, here's couple of cents from me.

Alexey agrees with the suggestion and notes it'd be a welcome addition to the PHP toolset. He also reminds developers that it wouldn't (and shouldn't) be used in production.

I hit a pretty good tutorial to enable PHP on Mac at About.com written by Angela Bradley that gets to the point: How to Install PHP on a Mac. Along the way I had to solve only one minor thing described in the caveat section at the end of this post. You see that the title of this post has the word installing (well I thought I had to install it '" that was my first reaction), but in fact it could be the word enabling because PHP is an integral part of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and we just need to enable it as you'll see soon.

He talks about enabling the web server, enabling PHP and testing the installation with a phpinfo. There's screenshots included so you can be sure you're in the right places.

I got a question the other day about running both ASP.NET and PHP on the same server and whether or not it works. The short answer I gave is "Yes". The longer answer, I'm going to give here. In point of fact, both ASP.NET and PHP work really well on the instance of IIS. They can't share session state but otherwise it's a very peaceful existence.

The slides from the presentation are included in the post. There's also a full tutorial on how to get things set up correctly so that PHP and ASP.NET can play nicely on the same machine.

In this "how to" we will see how to setup cherokee on Ubuntu with PHP5-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager). Although the cherokee CookBook claims that "If PHP-fpm binaries are found, those will be prioritized over the regular binaries." it turns out that the latest stable version of cherokee in Launchpad gives errors while enabling

A few calls to "apt-get" install some packages (Cherokee and php5-fpm) and changes to the Cherokee configuration - handled through its web-based interface - are all that's needed to add a new behavior rule to the default vServer to link to the PHP5-FPM install (as FastCGI).