PHP Development Environment Setup

[Tsarevich]

Hello all, don't laugh at my newbie question.

I want to set up a PHP development environment. What would Apache do for me? Can't I just inject it into HTML and view using Firefox while offline?

[GNU-Fan]

Basically, what a PHP interpreter does is to read a textfile (usually ending with .php) and then doing the appropriate actions. When this involves giving back any output (e.g. a text string) the PHP program usually returns it on the standard output.

A HTTP server can catch this output and sends it right to the browser of the viewer.

You could also invoke the PHP processor on the command line, feeding it the .php and redirecting the output to a file. e.g. output.html
This can then be opened with any web browser.

Apache has also a built-in PHP module or alternatively it can be configured to invoke the extern PHP interpreter via CGI as any http server.

For playing around a bit you might want to check out XAMPP.