Having fun with (Franken)PHP | davlgd tech blog

PHP is an old language, born in 1995. It’s so old that when, as a teenager, I made my first “dynamic” curriculum vitae with a CRUD interface, it was based on PHP. I was proud of it, I was a web developer (kinda)!

The former star returns

Like lots of old language it progressively became a (heavy) mess, leaving the hype to newcomers. But unlike many others, it has been able to reform.

Thus, its ecosystem is enjoying a breath of fresh air in recent years, with new tools and cool projects using them. And not just WordPress anymore. The Laravel framework, came in 2011 to challenge Symfony (2005). The Composer package manager, first released in 2012, quickly became the standard.

PHP 7.x, born in 2015, was a big step forward. At the same time, Facebook announced Hack, a PHP dialect, and the HHVM virtual machine. Then, everybody asked: why is such a big tech still using PHP and try to enhance it?

The fame was definitely back. The PHP 8.0 version, released in 2020, came with JIT and lots of new features. This branch is now getting better at every release, with a pretty stable schedule.

PHP for your CLI tools and scripts

What never ceases to amaze me about PHP, it’s how people forget it’s a scripting language, and not just a companion of Apache. By the way, mod_php is only one of the many Server API (SAPI) out there. You can use PHP with FastCGI, FPM, CLI, etc. It’s a powerful tool, not limited to web pages.

For example, you can create a urlCheck.php file with this content:

<?php

if ($argc !== 2) {
    echo "Usage: php {$argv[0]} <URL>\n";
    exit(1);
}

$url = $argv[1];

$curlRequest = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curlRequest, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_setopt($curlRequest, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curlRequest, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($curlRequest, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
curl_exec($curlRequest);

$status= curl_getinfo($curlRequest, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

echo "The website at the URL '{$url}' is " . (
    $status == 200 ? "available"
    : "not available\nHTTP response status code: {$status}"
). "\n";

curl_close($curlRequest);

And test it with httpstat.us:

php urlCheck.php https://httpstat.us/200
> The website at the URL 'https://httpstat.us' is available

php urlCheck.php https://httpstat.us/404
> The website at the URL 'https://httpstat.us/404' is not available
> HTTP response status code: 404

php urlCheck.php https://httpstat.us/307
> The website at the URL 'https://httpstat.us/307' is not available

php urlCheck.php https://httpstat.us/500
> The website at the URL 'https://httpstat.us/500' is not available
> HTTP response status code: 500

PHAR packages and dependencies

Then you can “compile” it in the PHP Archive (PHAR) format with Box. You’ll only need to create a box.json configuration file with this content:

{
  "main": "urlCheck.php",
  "output": "bin/urlCheck.phar"
}

To build and execute it:

box compile
bin/urlCheck.phar https://httpstat.us

The result is a PHP script with a shebang, that you can execute (if PHP is installed on your system). Note that its size (1107B) is twice the initial script’s (599B). To generate a SHA-512 sum and check it:

box verify bin/urlCheck.phar
box check:signature bin/urlCheck.phar PHAR_FILE_SHA512_SUM

To distribute your PHAR packages, you can rely on PHIVE (PHAR Installation and Verification Environment). If you’re looking for PHP tools and dependencies, look at Packagist, the main Composer package repository.

PHP native web server

As many languages, PHP has its own web server. It’s not as powerful as Apache or Nginx, but it’s enough for development and small projects. You can start it with the php -S command. You’ll need to specify the address and the port, but you can also set the root folder and a router script:

php -S localhost:8080 -t public/ router.php

If you want to go further with the PHP CLI, just look at the php --help output. Here are some of my favorite options:

php --ini                           # Show ini file paths and loaded files
php -d memory_limit=128M            # Set ini entry, e.g. memory limit
php --info                          # Show PHP information
php -s file.php                     # Output syntax highlighted source
php -m                              # Show compiled modules
php -a                              # Run an interactive shell
php -r 'echo "Hello, world!\n";'    # Run PHP code
php -l                              # Lint a file

Portable PHP

If you need to use PHP on a system where it’s not installed, Static PHP CLI can help you. It allows to build a PHP binary with no dependencies, including all the modules you need, supporting multiple platforms (Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, Windows) and Server API (cli, fpm, embed and micro).

You can download it or get the latest version for your system from the GitHub repository with this script (composer and git needed):

git clone https://github.com/crazywhalecc/static-php-cli.git
cd static-php-cli && chmod +x bin/setup-runtime
bin/setup-runtime
bin/composer install -n
chmod +x bin/spc
bin/spc --version

Check and fix dependencies:

bin/spc doctor --auto-fix

Build your PHP binary with the SAPI target and extensions you need:

bin/spc download --for-extensions="bcmath,openssl,tokenizer,ftp,curl"
bin/spc build "bcmath,openssl,tokenizer,ftp,curl" --build-cli --build-micro
bin/spc build "bcmath,openssl,tokenizer,ftp,curl" --build-all --enable-zts

You can also compress the binary with upx adding --with-upx-pack (Linux and Windows only). The final PHP binary will be in the build/ folder.

Embed your code with PHP(micro)

If you’ve read the Static PHP CLI documentation, you’ve seen the --build-micro option. It’s a way to “concatenate the produced binary with any php code then execute it”, based on a fork of the phpmicro project.

For example with our previous urlCheck.php script:

bin/spc micro:combine urlCheck.php -OurlCheck
./urlCheck https://httpstat.us

You can also use the built micro.sfx file in the buildroot/bin/ folder:

cat micro.sfx urlCheck.php > urlCheck && chmod +x urlCheck
./urlCheck https://httpstat.us

And now you get an independent binary, built from PHP code. The only problem here from my point of view ? Its size: ~10MB on my macOS arm64 system.

Can I deploy Nextcloud with that?

All of this is fun for tiny scripts, but what about complete, real life projects, as Nextcloud? Let’s try with a portable PHP CLI and the web installer. First, build PHP with needed and some optional extensions:

bin/spc download --for-extensions="bcmath,ctype,curl,dom,exif,fileinfo,filter,\
    ftp,gd,gmp,iconv,imagick,imap,intl,ldap,mbstring,memcached,openssl,pdo,\
    pdo_mysql,pdo_pgsql,pdo_sqlite,posix,session,simplexml,sodium,xml,\
    xmlreader,xmlwriter,zip"
bin/spc build "bcmath,ctype,curl,dom,exif,fileinfo,filter,ftp,gd,gmp,iconv,\
    imagick,imap,intl,ldap,mbstring,memcached,openssl,pdo,pdo_mysql,pdo_pgsql,\
    pdo_sqlite,posix,session,simplexml,sodium,xml,xmlreader,xmlwriter,zip" \
    --build-cli

Download the Nextcloud setup script, start the PHP server:

mkdir nextcloud
wget -q https://download.nextcloud.com/server/installer/setup-nextcloud.php -O nextcloud/setup-nextcloud.php
buildroot/bin/php -S localhost:8080 -t nextcloud/

You can access http://localhost:8080/setup-nextcloud.php with your browser to install Nextcloud as usual. Build an archive with the buildroot/bin/ folder and the setup PHP script: you have a ready-to-deploy Nextcloud.

Adding Caddy: welcome FrankenPHP!

It’s great for local tests, but nobody wants to use such an embedded web server in production. So let’s try Caddy, a modern, open-source, easy to use, modular web server, built in Go. You can configure it with a simple Caddyfile, use it as a reverse proxy or as a static file server.

It’s PHP-compatible through FastCGI/PHP-FPM, but such configuration can be difficult to make and is not very portable. It’s where FrankenPHP can help us.

FrankenPHP

Developed by Kévin Dunglas (from Les Tilleuls), it is a supercharged version of Caddy including PHP as a SAPI through a Go package. This server is available as a standalone binary or a Docker image.

I saw it gaining traction in the recent months, so I tried it on some projects to look at the good ways to use it, its growing features and benefits. But can we also use it with Nextcloud?.

After downloading the binary as frankenPHP, make it executable, create a www/ folder and get the Nextcloud setup script:

chmod +x frankenPHP
mkdir www
wget -q https://download.nextcloud.com/server/installer/setup-nextcloud.php -O www/setup-nextcloud.php

Then start frankenPHP with the www/ folder as web root:

./frankenPHP php-server -r www/

And… it works! You can access http://localhost:8080/setup-nextcloud.php with no modules to install, no configuration to make, no PHP-FPM to start. It’s possible to go further with a Caddyfile or using FrankenPHP’s features to create a more complex setup, or a binary. Let’s experience it yourself 😉.

To the Cloud and beyond!

You’re interested in FrankenPHP and want to deploy it easily on services like Clever Cloud ? Some days ago, I was asked how it could be achieved. Of course, you can easily. I’ve published example repositories for both standalone or containerized versions, with Laravel or Symfony frameworks.

Next step could be to package FrankenPHP for Exherbo Linux, include it with dedicated options for all our customers. As we’re revamping our PHP experience, it’s an interesting idea. Let’s discuss it.