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

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Face Detection with jQuery

    I've always been intrigued by recognition software because I cannot imagine the logic that goes into all of the algorithms. Whether it's voice, face, or other types of detection, people look and sound so different, pictures are shot differently, and from different angles, I...

  • By
    9 Incredible CodePen Demos

    CodePen is a treasure trove of incredible demos harnessing the power of client side languages.   The client side is always limited by what browsers provide us but the creativity and cleverness of developers always pushes the boundaries of what we think the front end can do.  Thanks to CSS...

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!