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Comment by jayflux | Hacker News Reader

> Easy to deploy: Upload files, done

I know people love to say this, but does anyone realistically make websites or web apps that way? No, not really. Even with PHP there are frameworks, there is a package manager, there is version control, and there are deployment systems.

Pretending that PHP developers are uploading a .php file to a shared hosting server (like in 2002) to suit the narrative feels disingenuous to me as it doesn’t align with what I see PHP developers doing at all.

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> I know people love to say this, but does anyone realistically make websites or web apps that way?

In PHP, I do. In other platforms, no. My personal PHP site is published by a git push to the server.

I do it all the time, thank you very much. For a simple web app I don't even need a framework - you can literally create a simple files/folder structure, include files, include folders and get stuff done. An yeah, you can also upload the files by FTP. For something more complicated I'd use WP or Code Igniter depending on the specific project. And then you can again just SFTP those files to the server.

That only works if your application has reasonably few users. Otherwise, your upload will result in some requests hitting a partially completed code base overwrite, that is, only some of your changes have been uploaded at request time, possibly leading to an error. This is a nice strategy for a hobby project, but it plain does not work for a business.

That's not true. For mission-critical apps we route the traffic to the stable version while uploading the new version. This may be similar to what most CI tools do but it doesn't change the fact that we just upload the files and can do it as we see fit. Another good solution is to simply switch off a feature for maintenance while uploading it's files. If your software is well planned, that's a breeze and still keeps the whole process very simple.

Well, you’re shifting the goal posts. The original scenario was simply uploading files to the application folder on production servers and reloading the page.

Of course there are viable strategies to avoid this specific issue, but they all introduce complexity of themselves.

>but does anyone realistically make websites or web apps that way?

You are correct in that a lot of PHP use now is larger frameworks with asset compilation and cache clearing etc, but even when developing on large systems like that it is nice to sometimes be able to just manually tweak a file and refresh.

For R&D and quick tests, just uploading a quick & dirty php file to the server is a very useful language feature to have IMO.

> For R&D and quick tests it is a very useful language feature to have IMO

Right, but unless you have an ftp server or quick ssh access and PHP isn’t doing any code caching that feature isn’t an advantage, how many developers are in that situation? Is this something you do?

If you’re running locally PHP spawns its own server which other runtimes have. If you’re running this on a server you’re most likely going to have app/code caching (apc Or opcache) switched on so you’ll need to restart the server anyway, in which case it’s not more advantageous than uploading a js file and restarting node.

> Right, but unless you have an ftp server or quick ssh access

These days all of that is built right into IDEs

> Is this something you do?

Yes. After linking my IDE to a remote location I can then noodle around with scripts to test whatever. The immediate nature of PHP means the instant you hit ctrl-s your changes are live online.

> If you’re running this on a server you’re most likely going to have app/code caching (apc Or opcache) switched on so you’ll need to restart the server anyway

In prod yes, but in dev environments all that is switched off as its not needed.

.. and as soon as you stop just uploading files (which, as you say, nobody does), a lot of the other advantages go away also. Laravel and Symphony both make PHP much slower. If you are going to have sane routing, you're probably going to need to tweak your websever to behave, well, less like a web server. There's a decent chance you'll need to clear a cache after you upload your changed files if you want to actually see those changes.

I actually like PHP a lot, and it's amazing how far it has come in the past 10 or so years, I just think way too many people assume you get the 2004-era PHP simplicity with all of the 2024-era PHP refinements, and you really don't. There's tradeoffs.

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