3

We've been thinking on writing a php interpreter for a project we've been working on. Interpreting aside, I've been trying - with no success - to find how the PHP interpreter interfaces with the http server. So I've come to you, o' dear knowledgeable people of Stack Overflow.

I have read that php listens on localhost:9000. Goes without saying that I tried to connect to that and it was no use. Maybe the webserver runs "php file.php" and gets the output?

Also, could a php interpreter that interprets .php files and our interpreter (lets call it pqp for the sake of argument) that interprets .pqp files coexist in a single webserver?

Thank you very much!

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

There are certain ways in which PHP interacts with a webserver. One is indeed to pipe PHP files into the PHP cli and serve the output as in this question. As I wrote there: It's really not recommended.

The next best thing is to expand the sapi of PHP, which is providing a set of connectors to a webserver. In this case, PHP is going to act like a webserver module (see apache+mod_php). A downside of this is that PHP is trying to parse everything it gets its hands on.

A webserver-independent method is to connect to PHP via the Common Gateway Interface, whcih is a well-defined interface for various interactive serverside components. It is, however, terribly slow (and a bit insecure).

The final step is to implement FastCGI. This is an improvement over CGI in that it tries to connect to a running process. In the PHP world, this is achieved through php-fpm which (by default) indeed listens on 9000/tcp.

Improve this answer
Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Comments

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.