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PHP 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. The development workflow you are used to while creating web applications remains the same. There is no new API/framework to learn. The process of turning an existing website into a desktop application is basically a matter of copying it to the "phpdesktop/www/" directory.
In a certain sense phpdesktop acts as a PHP to EXE compiler. It embeds a web browser, a multithreaded web server and a PHP interpreter. All embedded into a single application. The web server embedded is Mongoose (the MIT-licensed version). Supported browsers are Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. The package with Chrome embedded has no external dependencies, everything is included in the phpdesktop binaries and works out of the box on a user's computer.
All popular PHP frameworks are supported, see the PHP frameworks support wiki page for 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. PHP sources can be protected with the many of the available PHP encoders. PHP Desktop is released under non-restrictive license, thus it is free for commercial use.
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. This is not a concern when using PHP Desktop, as it is running an internal web server and serving pages through CGI. So when PHP script ends execution PHP-CGI process is killed and all memory is always freed.
Lots of other useful information can be found on the Knowledge Base wiki page and on the PHP Desktop Forum.
- PHP Desktop Chrome - go to the Download Chrome wiki page.
- PHP Desktop MSIE (Internet Explorer) - go to the Download MSIE wiki page.
New releases RSS/Atom feed
To be notified of new releases subscribe to this Atom feed.
- Documentation is on the Wiki Pages. Start with the Knowledge Base, Settings and Chrome settings wiki pages.
- Ask questions and report problems on the PHP Desktop Forum
- Please do not create issues in the Issue Tracker
- See also this tutorial (externally maintained): Create your first Desktop Application with PHP and PHP Desktop
If you would like to support PHP Desktop general development efforts by making a donation please click the Donate button below:
Please note that at this time PHP Desktop is unable to accept donations that sponsor the development of specific features. However you can make a donation with a comment that you would like to see some feature implemented and this will give it a higher priority, but apart from that there are no other guarantees.