PHP environment setup

WebEngine expects a modern PHP environment with the usual extensions for DOM, JSON, and HTTP-related work. Using gt or Composer will ensure the dependencies are installed correctly. Local development and production do not need to be identical, but they do need to be close enough that behaviour stays predictable.

Local development setup

To develop WebEngine applications locally, we want the following to be installed in our environment:

• PHP version 8.4+
• Composer
• the required PHP extensions: curl, dom, libxml, fileinfo, json, mbstring, pdo, pcntl
• the gt tooling

Once those are installed, verify them before starting a project:

php -v
composer --version
gt

From there, a project can be run with gt run, with gt serve, by using the PHP development server directly, or by setting up a local web server if you prefer to mirror production more closely.

Environment pitfalls

The most common early problems are:

• missing extensions
• the wrong PHP version
• permission issues
• clashing local services on the same port

It is usually worth checking the PHP binary your shell is actually using, especially on machines with several PHP versions installed.

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For production applications, web servers are a requirement.