From the course: Learning PHP

Developing locally - PHP Tutorial

From the course: Learning PHP

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Developing locally

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- [Instructor] While you will run PHP applications on a web server most of the time, setting a server up right now is not necessary. Instead, we can start with local development. A local development environment is generally free, or at least more affordable and faster than working with a server. In fact, a local development environment is basically a web server running on your computer. You also won't run the risk of crashing other websites on that server, so it's safer as well. There are a few ways you can develop locally. Depending on if you're on a Mac or PC, you can use MAMP or WAMP, respectively. Both of these applications will set up an Apache MySQL and PHP, or AMP, server right on your computer. You'll be able to manage files and view your web applications in the browser. Now, there's a lot to know about AMP servers, and while you can install one of them now and quickly be up and running, if you want to learn more, you can check out the Apache MySQL and PHP courses in the LinkedIn Learning library. These will give you more depth of knowledge on exactly what's happening on your computer. But again, for now you can just install MAMP, for example, and start writing PHP code for this course right away. You can also install an IDE, or integrated development environment. This is a program that will run PHP code directly in the program. No other tools are necessary. There are several IDEs available for PHP. A popular one is PhpStorm, which has a free 30 day trial. A free alternative is NetBeans. I'll be using VS Code to write the PHP, which I will then run in my browser using my local development environment. No matter what you choose, setting up a local environment is a fast, safe way to learn PHP.

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