PHP

What it is

PHP is a programming language made for websites. A PHP program runs on the server each time someone opens a page, and builds the page they see. WordPress is written in PHP, so it needs PHP to run. You don't write any PHP yourself to use WordPress.

History

Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP in 1994 as a small set of tools for tracking visits to his online résumé, and called it Personal Home Page Tools. He released the source code in 1995 so others could use it. In 1997 Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski began rewriting it, and it grew into the full language it is today. The name now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

Sources: PHP manual: History of PHP

What Nextweb does with it

WordPress installs PHP by this name, so pkg install wordpress brings it in. It can also be installed on its own with the command above.

PHP is installed once, in Nextweb's runtime folder. When you deploy a WordPress site, Nextweb starts a PHP runtime for that site and registers the site with its web server. How a deploy works has the details.

Before you start

It runs on Linux x64. Other platforms don't have a PHP package yet.

Versions

Published is the date the file was uploaded to Nextweb's download server.