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
    Being a Dev Dad

    I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Web Notifications API

    Every UI framework has the same set of widgets which have become almost essential to modern sites: modals, tooltips, button varieties, and notifications.  One problem I find is each site having their own widget colors, styles, and more -- users don't get a consistent experience.  Apparently the...

  • By
    Create an Animated Sliding Button Using MooTools

    Buttons (or links) are usually the elements on our sites that we want to draw a lot of attention to. Unfortunately many times they end up looking the most boring. You don't have to let that happen though! I recently found a...

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!