4 ms·

That assumes you have PHP already installed on the server right? I mean if you already have nodejs on the server, you can also just drop files in

jonwinstanley 4y ago
All the really cheap hosts have PHP installed for you. Not saying they are good, but someone starting out wouldn’t ever start installing things like that.
teh_klev 4y ago
Shared web hosting is still a big thing outside of our developer bubble. PHP is 99.9% guaranteed to be installed in these types of offerings, or it's a one click install on your control panel page.
kragen 4y ago
In my experience, node.js won't run random files it finds in the current directory, and normally it won't reload them if they change after it starts either. And you have to configure your URL space separately from copying files around; it's not as simple as copying homepage.php to homepagenew.php, hacking on it until it works, and then renaming homepagenew.php to homepage.php.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  You can use nodemon for that. PHP Apache similarly requires a process running in the background to handle requests right? My point is, the infrastructure needed to be able to simply drag and drop PHP files onto a PHP server, can be replicated with NodeJS too. There's nothing inherent to PHP about this process, it's just about how you set up you server. Now it's far more likely to find a hosting provider that already has PHP set up over NodeJS, but as the main article observed, those are in decline. That seems to me as simply a lack of demand. If people want static sites, theres no need for PHP. If people want even a bit of dynamicism, then it's not hard to use a framework, and you get far more scalability. The barrier to entry for these frameworks is so low that it's not worth using barebones PHP and then having to rewrite everything if you start wanting more.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Well, I suppose it's true that you can write command-line programs in the PHP language rather than run them as web pages, but PHP isn't just a language; it's also the software that implements this deployment model on various web servers, with built-in support for things like MySQL. node.js also implements a deployment model, but it's a different one. (node.js rather than JS is maybe a closer analogue to PHP.) nodemon gets you partway to the PHP model (by restarting your server when something changes) but not all the way; it doesn't start running random files it finds lying around. And people never run it in production. So, in summary, it is comprehensively not true that if you're already running node.js on the server, you can just drop files in. If you just drop files in, node.js will ignore them.
    - woojoo666 4y ago
      If you truly wanted to replicate the old PHP style of "drop a new file to handle a new route endpoint", then you would use something like Nodemon + Express. The whole drag and drop functionality is most definitely possible using a nodejs framework, and isn't that far from the popular tools being used today. It's just not common to do it this way, since people don't need it nor want it anymore
      - kragen 4y ago
        I've used Express (a little), and as far as I know, in Express you don't define routes by adding files to a directory, which then get implicitly run; you define routes by running code which calls methods on the app object, like app.get, to register routes. To run that route-registering code, you need to either insert it into your main program, or you need to require() the file it's in from your main program. If anything in this route-registering glob of code has a parse error or tries to require() something that doesn't exist, your server won't start. There's an enormous difference between claiming that "you can also just drop files on your server" and have a running application, which is what you said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31246963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31246963, and claiming that "[some] people don't need nor want" to just drop files on their server and have a running application, which is what you're saying now. Now you're bringing up "drag and drop functionality", which is a GUI gesture, totally irrelevant to the things PHP's deployment model enables, which you are correct are things that some people don't want. Here are some examples: 1. You can unzip a zipfile of PHP on your server and have a running app. This is super helpful when you're a novice who doesn't know much about processes and sockets. 2. You can add a new URL by sshing into the server and typing "cp homepage.php homepagenew.php", even using a slow or low-bandwidth connection. Then you can incrementally change the new URL's behavior by editing that new file, while the main site hums along unaffected—at least until you hose the production database. If you want to change the old version, you can type "mv homepagenew.php homepage.php". 3. If you have two PHP apps, like MediaWiki and WordPress, you can unzip them in two different directories on your server and have two apps running on the same server. If one of them is broken, even contains parse errors, it doesn't affect the other one. You can add links in one of them that link to the other. 4. You can temporarily disable a page by typing "chmod 0 upload.php", without breaking any other pages and without slowing down the server. 5. You can host apps belonging to hundreds of mutually untrusting users in the same Apache process, running on different virtual hosts, without the different users being able to screw up each other's "sites". 6. You can break into somebody's website by uploading a file to it with a .php extension in a directory that the webserver is (mis)configured to execute PHP files in. 7. You can make a usable backup of an old version of a page by typing "cp homepage.php homepage.old.4.php". Which you can later restore in a similar way, without affecting other pages, by doing the reverse. Without learning how to use Git. 8. You can load a page in your browser and not have to think about whether possibly the running server has an old version of the page in its memory and that's why your attempted fix has no effect. Now, PHP has never been my tool of choice; it's optimized by, and written by, people who don't know how to program, and I'd already been making web pages for years when it came out. It has its share of embarrassing bonehead design errors that can now never be fixed, though it did fix a lot of them. I like getting error messages instead of wrong results when I try to run broken code; it's one of the major reasons I switched from Perl to Python for soft stuff, near the turn of the millennium. I already know how to use version control systems, so I don't find it reassuring to have a directory full of "homepage.old.4.php". I want to be able to run the whole site on my laptop, not using the production database, and I want to be able to use a staging server. I don't want to have to worry about whether someone else has edited the files in production and that's why this page, that never should have worked, has always worked, until today. And I especially don't want my site getting popped because the uploads directory treated .php files as plain text but .php4 files as executable PHP. (Oops!) But the fact is that PHP's deployment model enables beginning programmers to manage a website by putting files in directories, copying files around, making backup copies of files, and so on, without ever taking their entire site down with a parse error at startup, and, as far as I know, there is nothing even vaguely similar for node.js. Nodemon isn't it. Express isn't either.

jonwinstanley 4y ago

All the really cheap hosts have PHP installed for you. Not saying they are good, but someone starting out wouldn’t ever start installing things like that.

teh_klev 4y ago

Shared web hosting is still a big thing outside of our developer bubble. PHP is 99.9% guaranteed to be installed in these types of offerings, or it's a one click install on your control panel page.

kragen 4y ago

In my experience, node.js won't run random files it finds in the current directory, and normally it won't reload them if they change after it starts either. And you have to configure your URL space separately from copying files around; it's not as simple as copying homepage.php to homepagenew.php, hacking on it until it works, and then renaming homepagenew.php to homepage.php.

woojoo666 4y ago
You can use nodemon for that. PHP Apache similarly requires a process running in the background to handle requests right? My point is, the infrastructure needed to be able to simply drag and drop PHP files onto a PHP server, can be replicated with NodeJS too. There's nothing inherent to PHP about this process, it's just about how you set up you server. Now it's far more likely to find a hosting provider that already has PHP set up over NodeJS, but as the main article observed, those are in decline. That seems to me as simply a lack of demand. If people want static sites, theres no need for PHP. If people want even a bit of dynamicism, then it's not hard to use a framework, and you get far more scalability. The barrier to entry for these frameworks is so low that it's not worth using barebones PHP and then having to rewrite everything if you start wanting more.
- kragen 4y ago
  Well, I suppose it's true that you can write command-line programs in the PHP language rather than run them as web pages, but PHP isn't just a language; it's also the software that implements this deployment model on various web servers, with built-in support for things like MySQL. node.js also implements a deployment model, but it's a different one. (node.js rather than JS is maybe a closer analogue to PHP.) nodemon gets you partway to the PHP model (by restarting your server when something changes) but not all the way; it doesn't start running random files it finds lying around. And people never run it in production. So, in summary, it is comprehensively not true that if you're already running node.js on the server, you can just drop files in. If you just drop files in, node.js will ignore them.
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    If you truly wanted to replicate the old PHP style of "drop a new file to handle a new route endpoint", then you would use something like Nodemon + Express. The whole drag and drop functionality is most definitely possible using a nodejs framework, and isn't that far from the popular tools being used today. It's just not common to do it this way, since people don't need it nor want it anymore
    - kragen 4y ago
      I've used Express (a little), and as far as I know, in Express you don't define routes by adding files to a directory, which then get implicitly run; you define routes by running code which calls methods on the app object, like app.get, to register routes. To run that route-registering code, you need to either insert it into your main program, or you need to require() the file it's in from your main program. If anything in this route-registering glob of code has a parse error or tries to require() something that doesn't exist, your server won't start. There's an enormous difference between claiming that "you can also just drop files on your server" and have a running application, which is what you said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31246963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31246963, and claiming that "[some] people don't need nor want" to just drop files on their server and have a running application, which is what you're saying now. Now you're bringing up "drag and drop functionality", which is a GUI gesture, totally irrelevant to the things PHP's deployment model enables, which you are correct are things that some people don't want. Here are some examples: 1. You can unzip a zipfile of PHP on your server and have a running app. This is super helpful when you're a novice who doesn't know much about processes and sockets. 2. You can add a new URL by sshing into the server and typing "cp homepage.php homepagenew.php", even using a slow or low-bandwidth connection. Then you can incrementally change the new URL's behavior by editing that new file, while the main site hums along unaffected—at least until you hose the production database. If you want to change the old version, you can type "mv homepagenew.php homepage.php". 3. If you have two PHP apps, like MediaWiki and WordPress, you can unzip them in two different directories on your server and have two apps running on the same server. If one of them is broken, even contains parse errors, it doesn't affect the other one. You can add links in one of them that link to the other. 4. You can temporarily disable a page by typing "chmod 0 upload.php", without breaking any other pages and without slowing down the server. 5. You can host apps belonging to hundreds of mutually untrusting users in the same Apache process, running on different virtual hosts, without the different users being able to screw up each other's "sites". 6. You can break into somebody's website by uploading a file to it with a .php extension in a directory that the webserver is (mis)configured to execute PHP files in. 7. You can make a usable backup of an old version of a page by typing "cp homepage.php homepage.old.4.php". Which you can later restore in a similar way, without affecting other pages, by doing the reverse. Without learning how to use Git. 8. You can load a page in your browser and not have to think about whether possibly the running server has an old version of the page in its memory and that's why your attempted fix has no effect. Now, PHP has never been my tool of choice; it's optimized by, and written by, people who don't know how to program, and I'd already been making web pages for years when it came out. It has its share of embarrassing bonehead design errors that can now never be fixed, though it did fix a lot of them. I like getting error messages instead of wrong results when I try to run broken code; it's one of the major reasons I switched from Perl to Python for soft stuff, near the turn of the millennium. I already know how to use version control systems, so I don't find it reassuring to have a directory full of "homepage.old.4.php". I want to be able to run the whole site on my laptop, not using the production database, and I want to be able to use a staging server. I don't want to have to worry about whether someone else has edited the files in production and that's why this page, that never should have worked, has always worked, until today. And I especially don't want my site getting popped because the uploads directory treated .php files as plain text but .php4 files as executable PHP. (Oops!) But the fact is that PHP's deployment model enables beginning programmers to manage a website by putting files in directories, copying files around, making backup copies of files, and so on, without ever taking their entire site down with a parse error at startup, and, as far as I know, there is nothing even vaguely similar for node.js. Nodemon isn't it. Express isn't either.