DownloadPHP Desktop is an open-source project founded by Czarek Tomczak in 2012 to provide a way for developing native desktop GUI applications using web technologies such as PHP, HTML5, JavaScript and SQLite. Think of it as Electron for PHP. It is a convenient tool for converting PHP web apps and PHP CLI tools to desktop applications with little effort. The development workflow you are used to while creating web applications remains the same, there is no new framework / API to learn. The process of turning an existing website into a desktop application is basically a matter of copying it to the directory. In a certain sense phpdesktop acts as a PHP to EXE compiler. It embeds a web browser, a multi-threaded web server and a PHP interpreter. All embedded into a single application, a portable folder that you can easily distribute to end-users by packing it to zip archive or by making an installer for your application. The web server embedded is a custom edition of Mongoose.
Features
- All popular PHP frameworks are supported
- It is one of the top goals for PHP Desktop to be stable, to work reliably
- PHP Desktop does not suffer from memory leaks
- PHP by design was never intended for running long hours/days, as desktop applications usually do
- Example configurations for CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Symfony, Yii and Zend Framework
- You can create a standalone executable for distribution with the help of the Inno Setup installer
Project Samples
