Shiphp The PHP Developer's Guide

Making Your First Website with PHP

Written on October 9th, 2017 by Karl Hughes

In order to build a working website on your computer that is powered by PHP, you’ll need to first have PHP installed and know some basic HTML. In this tutorial we will make a website that displays variables written in PHP code to users in an HTML document. Let’s get started!

  1. Open a text editor and create a file called index.html
  2. Add the following code to your new file:
<!doctype html>

<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>My PHP Website</title>
</head>

<body>
  <h1>My PHP Website</h1>
  <p>Here is some static content.</p>
</body>
</html>

This is HTML code, which can be seen in a web browser. You can open this file in Google Chrome or Firefox and you should see a website like this:

It’s not very pretty, but it’s a simple website!

Right now this website is static, meaning that there’s not a server or any PHP code powering it. Next, we’ll convert this simple static web page into a dynamic one with PHP:

  1. Rename your index.html file to index.php
  2. Open a command line terminal and navigate to the index.php file.
  3. PHP comes with a built-in web server. We’ll use this to try out our new webpage by running php -S localhost:8000
  4. Now open http://localhost:8000 in your web browser. You should see the same thing we saw before with the static HTML page.

  5. Open the index.php file in a text editor. Below the first <p> tags, create a new set of <p> tags and add the following PHP code:

Now when you refresh http://localhost:8000 you will see a new line. This line was generated in PHP, and now our site is truly dynamic!

References

1. index.html

<!doctype html>

<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>My PHP Website</title>
</head>

<body>
  <h1>My PHP Website</h1>
  <p>Here is some static content.</p>
</body>
</html>

2. index.php

<!doctype html>

<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>My PHP Website</title>
</head>

<body>
  <h1>My PHP Website</h1>
  <p>Here is some static content.</p>
  <p><?php echo "Here is some dynamic content"; ?></p>
</body>
</html>

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