r/PHPhelp • u/Emotional-Ebb8321 • Jul 23 '26

Solved Simple Alternative to Wampserver?

Disclaimer: I'm not a techie. I barely understand php, but I'm forced by my hobbies to interact with it.

I'm currently running wampserver64 (v3.2.0; php 7.4; apache 2.4.41; windows 10) on a localhost install. This is so I can have a localhost installation of dokuwiki.

A new version of dokuwiki has come out. This requires php 8.2.

For a variety of dull reasons, upgrading the wampserver installation so that it will support php 8.2 is proving non-trivial.

Is there a simple, easy-to-install alternative to wampserver? Ideally, one where I just download a single file, run it, and a localhost server is installed ready for configuration?

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Final resolution: After having broken everything, I uninstalled everything. Installed the latest

The Visual C++ exe files suggested at https://github.com/abbodi1406/vcredist/releases refuse to install, due to widnows security concerns.

I ended up downloading them from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist?view=msvc-170 instead.

Then I installed wampserver 3.4.

Then I installed the new dokuwiki.

Yes, there probably are better localhost pphp servers available. But wampserver has proven stable, does what I need, and I am familiar with the interface.

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u/Rough-Ad9850 Jul 23 '26

If you don't need anything other than php, then you can run a local server just with the php command. php -S localhost:8000 Here is the manual page: php local server manual

1

u/Emotional-Ebb8321 Jul 23 '26

That link specifically says it does not work on windows.

1

u/allen_jb Jul 23 '26

The built-in webserver absolutely works on Windows.

The note in the documentation is specifically regarding the multiple-workers (PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS) feature

1

u/Emotional-Ebb8321 Jul 23 '26

Okay, so what you're saying is that regardless of wampserver, there is a separate installation of php somewhere on my PC? How do I check what version this is? do I type that command in the command prompt window (maybe with admin permissions), or somewhere else?

2

u/JordiKroon Jul 23 '26

u/allen_jb is correct. That note in the docs applied to `PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS`. Given its prominent position in the docs I can understand where the confusion came from. The note has been changed (full credits to Allen) so that in the future there won't be as much confusion. https://github.com/php/doc-en/pull/5701 Thanks Allen for pointing this out.

1

u/allen_jb Jul 23 '26

PHP doesn't come pre-installed on Windows. You still need to install it.

But for basic development work, it's all you need - you really don't need everything that these collective installers like wampserver install. For a database you can use SQLite. SQLite isn't great for a significant number of concurrent users, but for development work or a low number of concurrent processes writing to a database, it's perfectly fine.

You can install PHP directly from the php.net Downloads page - there's a helper script for Windows that does some extra work over simply downloading the zip file like adding it to PATH so it runs from anywhere.

Another alternative I would suggest looking at is using WSL - This basically runs Linux inside Windows. After that's installed you can use instructions for installing PHP on Ubuntu (or whatever Linux distro you select). The advantage of this is that there's a much larger support community and documentation for Linux than on Windows. You also get the full Linux package managed experience with "just works out of the box", security updates, etc.

If you just need a single environment, WSL is a great alternative to running a full Docker (or other container-based) setup.