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How to Use PHP’s built-in Web Server

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How to Use PHP’s built-in Web Server

The PHP CLI SAPI comes with a built-in web server. It can be used to run your PHP applications locally during development, for testing or for application demonstrations. This way, you don’t have to bother configuring a full-featured web server such as Apache or nginx.

Tip

The preferred way to develop your Symfony application is to use Symfony Local Web Server.

Caution

The built-in web server is meant to be run in a controlled environment. It is not designed to be used on public networks.

Symfony provides a web server built on top of this PHP server to simplify your local setup. This server is distributed as a bundle, so you must first install and enable the server bundle.

Installing the Web Server Bundle

First, execute this command:

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$ cd your-project/
$ composer require --dev symfony/web-server-bundle

Then, enable the bundle in the kernel of the application:

// app/AppKernel.php
class AppKernel extends Kernel
{
    public function registerBundles()
    {
        $bundles = [
            // ...
        ];

        if ('dev' === $this->getEnvironment()) {
            // ...
            $bundles[] = new Symfony\Bundle\WebServerBundle\WebServerBundle();
        }

        // ...
    }

    // ...
}

Starting the Web Server

Running a Symfony application using PHP’s built-in web server is as easy as executing the server:start command:

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$ php bin/console server:start

This starts the web server at localhost:8000 in the background that serves your Symfony application.

By default, the web server listens on port 8000 on the loopback device. You can change the socket passing an IP address and a port as a command-line argument:

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# passing a specific IP and port
$ php bin/console server:start 192.168.0.1:8080

# passing '*' as the IP means to use 0.0.0.0 (i.e. any local IP address)
$ php bin/console server:start *:8080

New in version 3.4: The support of * as a valid IP address was introduced in Symfony 3.4.

Note

You can use the server:status command to check if a web server is listening:

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$ php bin/console server:status

Tip

Some systems do not support the server:start command, in these cases you can execute the server:run command. This command behaves slightly different. Instead of starting the server in the background, it will block the current terminal until you terminate it (this is usually done by pressing Ctrl and C).

Using the built-in Web Server from inside a Virtual Machine

If you want to use the built-in web server from inside a virtual machine and then load the site from a browser on your host machine, you’ll need to listen on the 0.0.0.0:8000 address (i.e. on all IP addresses that are assigned to the virtual machine):

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$ php bin/console server:start 0.0.0.0:8000

Caution

You should NEVER listen to all interfaces on a computer that is directly accessible from the Internet. The built-in web server is not designed to be used on public networks.

Command Options

The built-in web server expects a “router” script (read about the “router” script on php.net) as an argument. Symfony already passes such a router script when the command is executed in the prod or dev environment. Use the --router option to use your own router script:

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$ php bin/console server:start --router=app/config/my_router.php

If your application’s document root differs from the standard directory layout, you have to pass the correct location using the --docroot option:

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$ php bin/console server:start --docroot=public_html

Stopping the Server

When you finish your work, you can stop the web server with the following command:

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$ php bin/console server:stop

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.