Serve a Directory with PHP

By  on  

Many developers have a giggle at PHP, even looking down at the language, but let's be honest:  most of our blogs are powered by it (WordPress) and it's a great language to dabble around with.  I cut my teeth on PHP, though I prefer to avoid PHP these days.

But when I need to experiment with a simple PHP coding task for the sake of a blog feature, I look for the simplest possible serving solution to accomplish that feat.  Luckily PHP provides me a quick solution for testing:

php -S localhost:8888

The command above allows for serving of a directory via PHP, thus allowing for a simple PHP "site" to be served enough to confirm that my code testing works properly.

Serving a directory with PHP, python, or Node.js ... the same problem solved for different languages!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Scoped Styles

    There are plenty of awesome new attributes we've gotten during the HTML5 revolution:  placeholder, download, hidden, and more.  Each of these attributes provides us a different level of control over an element on the page, but there's a new element attribute that allows...

  • By
    HTML5 Input Types Alternative

    As you may know, HTML5 has introduced several new input types: number, date, color, range, etc. The question is: should you start using these controls or not? As much as I want to say "Yes", I think they are not yet ready for any real life...

Discussion

  1. Joris Ros

    You can add easily a public directory to it by adding -t parameter.

    php -S localhost:8080 -t public_html
    
  2. Love tips like this, thanks for putting them together!

  3. If you’re using Linux. sudo right is required

  4. Elena

    To change a current directory function chdir() is used. It returns true on success and false on failure. Please note function chdir() works in PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7. Following is a description of this function.

    https://www.mindstick.com/Articles/12164/directory-handling-in-php

    http://pixelcode.co.uk/tutorials/php/directory-handling-in-php/

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!