20 years later, and still nobody's even come close to PHP's ease of deployment | Hacker News Reader

20 years later, and still nobody's even come close to PHP's ease of deployment

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This is partially the reason why WordPress is still so popular; it's incredibly easy to deploy and works on pretty much every shared server known to man. It's also why, as nice as it is, stuff like Ghost is pretty much forever doomed to be less popular; it's just trickier to set up on shared hosting or for someone who doesn't know anything about server management.

It's also why the likes of Media Wiki (for wikis) and the old guard forum scripts (phpBB/MyBB/SMF/vBulletin/XenForo/IPB) haven't been dethroned in their markets too; using PHP means setting them up is basically trivial compared to competitors in other languages.

So if you're trying to compete with one of these scripts, maybe bite the bullet and just go with PHP like they did. It may not seem as 'cool' as going with a more modern language or tech stack, but it makes your script easy to deploy and gives it a lot more server support too, which likely outweighs those other factors if you're aiming for the wider market.

Any collection of CGI scripts (like a Perl application) is as easy to deploy as PHP.

Interpreted CGI programs have comparably long startup times. FastCGI is an answer which is supported by all major scripting platforms.

The thing is: A FastCGI Python script still requires several lines of boilerplate to do the same thing a PHP script can do (i.e. statelessly answering a request). PHP makes that just damned easy.

Now that I think, a Python script (not CGI, but with embedded webserver) is even easier to deploy. For PHP you need container to run it (Apache HTTPD, etc.), the Python script you just execute and that's all.

That's right, there are a number of widespread/popular standalone we servers for Python. However, many folks already have some classical web server running and "only" want to add "a grain of" server side dynamics. That's still where PHP excels. Damned easy to get started with.

I've only done a little PHP, but the key feature is that your entry points are just template files, right? You spin up a daemon and someone "visits" your PHP file and it renders itself.

I wonder if you could achieve those ergonomics with Node/Express: you spin up a daemon and put JS files in a directory that just export HTML render-functions, and bam. People can just "visit" your JS templates.

If the best language to use is the one you know and PHP is one of the easiest to learn.. then it makes sense!

That's simply not true.

PHP is good about that. Golang is better.

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