Jason Lefkowitzjalefkowit@hachyderm.io
Oct 22, 2026, 2:46 PM@mhoye The deployment story really is an important one. It amazes me that in all this time nobody has seriously tried to challenge PHP on it
Replies
Oct 22, 2026, 10:24 PM@jalefkowit sftp, or rsync, or literally just “cp”. It’s almost nothing.
FoolishOwlfoolishowl@social.coopOct 23, 2026, 4:42 AM@mhoye @jalefkowit Okay, now I'm starting to get it.
I've set up Dokuwiki and phpBB just by uploading tarballs and unpacking them into /var/www; everything else takes more infrastructure than that.
Raphael Fetzerpheraph@mastodon.socialOct 23, 2026, 6:34 AM@foolishowl @mhoye @jalefkowit Yesterday I had to migrate a phpBB site with 250,000 posts to a new host; it really just involved copying the files and the database, and it worked straight away.
Just a trash panda 🦝trashpanda@m.alittlenook.netOct 24, 2026, 6:30 PM@pheraph @foolishowl @mhoye @jalefkowit The way that I miss being able to deploy things this way. It was so much easier to wrap my head around. I feel like the simplicity made everything else easier from deployment, to patching, to backups/restores, to firewalling and applying restrictions.
I miss being able to just pop open a text editor and start hacking on stuff too. It is like a sewing machine vs handsewn. When I want to sew, I want to sew, not spend hours setting up my sewing environment.
ArneBabArneBab@rollenspiel.socialOct 22, 2026, 10:47 PM@jalefkowit That PHP is pretty friendly to hosters, for example with the option to set integrated usage limits, is another plus.
Matching that is really hard.
That said: PHP makes it really easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and many already did.
@mhoye
Oct 22, 2026, 11:58 PM@jalefkowit @mhoye
I mean.
You can still do it with Python or Ruby. The only extra step is having to restart the server.
People don't *generally* do it because you *usually* have extra steps like migrating your database and building the assets.
rugkrugk@chaos.socialOct 23, 2026, 8:29 AM@art_codesmith @jalefkowit @mhoye Yeah also was about to say that, any interpreted language should offer the same advantage, should not it?
- Oct 23, 2026, 8:30 AM
@rugk @jalefkowit @mhoye Even a compiled language.
You build the binary, upload the binary, restart the process. 
Raven667raven667@hachyderm.ioOct 24, 2026, 6:37 PM@art_codesmith @jalefkowit @mhoye I'm not sure python is a great example, you need to learn two languages, python and jinja, as well as uv or pip and the ecosystem is all about breaking compat somewhere in the dep tree requiring virtualenv, CI with automated testing and regular maintenance just to stay working.
Python does not really deploy just by copying some files over sftp and its not something you can just add to HTML for light server-side scripting. I think tools like Django are great for building common CRUD apps when some business process outgrows a spreadsheet, but PHP has a whole other set of use cases its optimized for.
Space Catitude 🚀TerryHancock@realsocial.lifeOct 23, 2026, 2:49 AM@jalefkowit
PHP grew up with Apache, just like Javascript grew up with browsers. It's always going to be easier to use them than to replace them.
@mhoye
Ducoduco@norden.socialOct 23, 2026, 9:26 AM@jalefkowit @mhoye Netlify, Vercel, Render, etc. try to make it as simple for JavaScript apps. It's a little bit more complicated, but still not very complicated to deploy them. But yes, would be interesting to just needing to upload them and being done. Cloud functions in general are going into that direction. There are a lot of implications for them already.