README

The PHP Interpreter

PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to
web development. Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your
blog to the most popular websites in the world.

PHP is distributed under the Modified BSD License
(SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause).




 Documentation

The PHP manual is available at php.net/docs.

 Installation

 Prebuilt packages and binaries

Prebuilt packages and binaries can be used to get up and running fast with PHP.

For Windows, the PHP binaries can be obtained from
windows.php.net. After extracting the archive the
.exe files are ready to use.

For other systems, see the installation chapter.

 Building PHP source code

For Windows, see Build your own PHP on Windows.

For a minimal PHP build from Git, you will need autoconf, bison, and re2c. For
a default build, you will additionally need libxml2 and libsqlite3.

On Ubuntu, you can install these using:

shell
sudo apt install -y pkg-config build-essential autoconf bison re2c libxml2-dev libsqlite3-dev


On Fedora, you can install these using:

shell
sudo dnf install re2c bison autoconf make ccache libxml2-devel sqlite-devel


On MacOS, you can install these using brew:

shell
brew install autoconf bison re2c libiconv libxml2 sqlite


or with MacPorts:

shell
sudo port install autoconf bison re2c libiconv libxml2 sqlite3


Generate configure:

shell
./buildconf


Configure your build. --enable-debug is recommended for development, see
./configure --help for a full list of options.

shell
 For development
./configure --enable-debug
 For production
./configure


Build PHP. To speed up the build, specify the maximum number of jobs using the
-j argument:

shell
make -j4


The number of jobs should usually match the number of available cores, which
can be determined using nproc.

 Testing PHP source code

PHP ships with an extensive test suite, the command make test is used after
successful compilation of the sources to run this test suite.

Tests run in parallel by default, using up to 10 detected logical processors.
Set -jN in TEST_PHP_ARGS or TESTS to override the worker count:

shell
make TEST_PHP_ARGS=-j4 test


This runs make test with a maximum of 4 concurrent jobs. Alternatively,
use -j1 to run tests sequentially.

Use the TEST_PHP_ARGS or TESTS variable to test only specific directories:

shell
make TESTS=tests/lang/ test


The qa.php.net site provides more detailed info about
testing and quality assurance.

 Installing PHP built from source

After a successful build (and test), PHP may be installed with:

shell
make install


Depending on your permissions and prefix, make install may need superuser
permissions.

 PHP extensions

Extensions provide additional functionality on top of PHP. PHP consists of many
essential bundled extensions. Additional extensions can be found on the
PIE Extensions list, and installed with
🥧 PIE, the PHP Installer for Extensions or the
deprecated PHP Extension Community 

Top issues

Latest release

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 8.5.12. This is a security release fixing two critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619) that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. All PHP 8.5 users are strongly encouraged to update immediately.

There are no complete mitigations, updating is the only safe choice. See the security advisory for details.

For source downloads of PHP 8.5.12 please visit our downloads page, Windows source and binaries can also be found there. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.