Hey you MacOS users, you! PHP on a MacOS machine?

Question

I've heard, MacOS includes its own server, right on the machine, right out of the box! Does that mean, I could run my very own PHP stuff right there, without uploading to a danged online server?

P.S., just for testing purposes, for developing my website...

Answer 1

The answer is yes, you can run PHP on Mac OS, but it's a little more complicated than just that. By "includes its own server" I'm assuming you mean a web server, since we're talking about PHP. Yes, there is a pretty basic web server built in to Mac OS, but not something you would probably want to do serious web hosting with, especially the kind of dynamic pages that you would use PHP for. There are other Web server packages available that you could install on OS X, however.

What do you intend to use it for? Are you developing some kind of web content that you intend to serve up to the public internet? Do you have an internet connection with a static IP or some kind of domain host that can handle dynamic IPs? Getting PHP to run in MacOS is probably not the biggest hurdle in the situation you're describing.

Unless you have a fair amount of experience with running a web server (or want to learn as you go), I would say that getting an inexpensive host that can handle PHP (such as GoDaddy) is probably less hassle.

Edit: I should clarify when I say MacOS can run PHP, it doesn't straight out of the box. You have to install it. See http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/php.html for more information.

If you're just doing testing, that simplifies things a great deal.