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
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    PHP Woot Checker – Tech, Wine, and Shirt Woot

    If you haven't heard of Woot.com, you've been living under a rock. For those who have been under the proverbial rock, here's the plot: Every day, Woot sells one product. Once the item is sold out, no more items are available for purchase. You don't know how many...

  • By
    Using MooTools to Instruct Google Analytics to Track Outbound Links

    Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about who's coming to your website. One of the most important statistics the service provides is the referrer statistic -- you've gotta know who's sending people to your website, right? What about where you send others though?

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!