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Comment by rll | Hacker News Reader

He kind of lost me on his opening CGI argument. Most PaaS I am familiar with don't run PHP through CGI at all. Either Apache mod_php or nginx php-fpm. I guess the author means a CGI-like model or something?

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OP here. That's what I meant. We often compare PHP to e.g. Ruby/Rails, Python/Django...but what we're really thinking of when we think of PHP is CGI.

Most of the same things we say about PHP deployment (it's easy, can be done in one file, etc) could equally be applied to writing CGI scripts in Ruby or Python. PHP is just a more extreme example of CGI, and arguably easier, because there's so much support for PHP-based CGI compared to Python/Ruby/Node CGI.

I'm afraid you're misinformed. When we think of PHP, most of us are thinking of PHP embedded in the Apache web server using the mod_php extension. This is what almost everybody was using until very recently when FastCGI gained some popularity and people started using PHP-FPM with nginx. Pretty much any PHP host will be running a LAMP stack with mod_php.

OK most hosts will be running mod_php or fcgi and not pure CGI. I just mean CGI as a shorthand for this approach. It doesn't make a difference from the developer's perspective on a shared host. It's still just "here's a file I created, now point your browser at it".

FPM is a CGI like model. The F stands for FastCGI. Also many cheap-ass virtual servers do run php-cgi.

Most dirt cheap hosts do. PHP via a PaaS is just as hard as Ruby is his argument.

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