Start the built-in PHP web server
Usually when you are building a website, you’ll have a web server such as Nginx or Apache that sits in front of the PHP service. But in this lesson, we’ll use a much simpler method: use the built-in PHP web server!
Instructor: [0:00] Usually when you are building a website, you'll have a web server, such as Nginx or Apache, that sits in front of the PHP service. Then some configuration needs to be added so that web server can properly serve web requests who handle PHP files.
[0:16] You'll definitely want to set up this external server/PHP combo on production sites, but right now we just need to learn PHP.
[0:25] We'll use a much simpler method, use the built-in PHP web server. You'll want to first open up terminal.
[0:32] You can do this right on your host with the terminal app, or if you are using PhpStorm, you can go to View, Tool Windows, Terminal. We can see that this works the same way as the normal terminal app.
[0:48] Let's call the PHP binary again, but this time passing in the --help argument. This gives us the available arguments we can pass to this PHP script.
[1:00] One of those being the -S command, which runs the built-in PHP web server. This argument expects an address port combo to be passed in after the -s flag.
[1:17] Let's go ahead and call PHP -S, and the address here will always be localhost since we are running it on our own machine, followed by a colon, followed by any available port.
[1:32] Note that you cannot use any port lower than 1024, as those are considered privileged ports that require higher security privileges. It's common to use port 8000 for this built-in web server.
[1:47] The default port for web servers is 80. Just adding a couple zeros at the end, makes this easy to remember.
[1:55] Now that we have our web server started, we can visit this localhost 8000 address in our web browser, and we'll see a not found page. Don't worry, this is actually great.
[2:08] This purple background at the top, lets us know that the builds in PHP server is serving up this request.
[2:16] If we check out our terminal again, we will see that there is some output to the console here, showing the web server accepting the request, serving it up, and then closing out this web request.
[2:28] Now that you have your editor set up and a web server running, it's time to start writing some PHP.