The PHP Interpreter

PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world. PHP is distributed under the PHP License v3.01.

Documentation

The PHP manual is available at php.net/docs.

Installation

Prebuilt packages and binaries

Prebuilt packages and binaries can be used to get up and running fast with PHP.

For Windows, the PHP binaries can be obtained from windows.php.net. After extracting the archive the *.exe files are ready to use.

For other systems, see the installation chapter.

Building PHP from source

On *nix systems:

./buildconf
./configure
make
make test

See ./configure -h and make -h for configuration options. For example, the -j option allows parallel execution of the build recipes where N is the number of available processor cores:

make -j N

For Windows, see Build your own PHP on Windows.

PHP extensions

Extensions provide additional functionality on top of PHP. PHP consists of many essential bundled extensions. Additional extensions can be found in the PHP Extension Community Library - PECL.

Contributing

The PHP source code is located in the Git repository at git.php.net. Contributions are most welcome by forking the GitHub mirror repository and sending a pull request.

Discussions are done on GitHub, but depending on the topic can also be relayed to the official PHP developer mailing list internals@lists.php.net.

New features require an RFC and must be accepted by the developers. See Request for comments - RFC and Voting on PHP features for more information on the process.

Bug fixes do not require an RFC but require a bug tracker ticket. Open a ticket at bugs.php.net and reference the bug id using #NNNNNN.

Fix #55371: get_magic_quotes_gpc() throws deprecation warning

After removing magic quotes, the get_magic_quotes_gpc function caused a
deprecated warning. get_magic_quotes_gpc can be used to detect the
magic_quotes behavior and therefore should not raise a warning at any time.
The patch removes this warning.

Pull requests are not merged directly on GitHub. All PRs will be pulled and pushed through git.php.net. See Git workflow for more details.

Guidelines for contributors

See further documents in the repository for more information on how to contribute:

• Contributing to PHP
• PHP coding standards
• Git rules
• Mailinglist rules
• PHP release process

Testing

To run tests the make test is used after a successful compilation of the sources. The -j option provides faster parallel execution based on the number of cores (N):

make -j N test

The qa.php.net site provides more detailed info about testing and quality assurance.

Credits

For the list of people who've put work into PHP, please see the PHP credits page.