4 min read
How PHP Code Runs
Prerequisites: Your first PHP script
Historically, PHP ran as a request-per-page model: a web server
(Apache/Nginx) receives an HTTP request, hands it to the PHP
interpreter, which runs the matching .php file top to bottom and
outputs the result — then the whole process starts fresh for the
next request, with no state carried over automatically.
PHP's built-in development server is the fastest way to try this locally, with no separate web server needed:
php -S localhost:8000
Visiting http://localhost:8000/hello.php runs that file and shows
its output. In production, PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager)
handles this same request/response cycle far more efficiently,
covered in Level 3.