Simple, easy to remember, always within reach ❤️

PHPs built-in dev server is great, is it going to compare against the likes of Apache and nginx? No, nor should it. It's not meant to be a production server, it's the simplest little server which is quick and easy. I use it for all kinds of little projects, hacks, test servers, etc.

One thing that many people don't know is that since PHP 7.4 it supports multiple threads via an environment variable. Setting the environment variable PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS=$(nproc) will automatically create as many workers as your machine has threads. This can speed up apps which make a lot of parallel requests.

I have set this env variable in my .bashrc file so that any server that gets spun up gets the benefit.

Thanks to IPv6 shorthand notation, there is an even shorter version, though arguably it's harder to type:

php -S [::1]:8008

Update (29 Oct 25) - Dynamic Ports

Since PHP 8.0 if you use port 0 then PHP will bind to the next available port. Apparently this is a common non-standard but common feature in software.