[st_goliath]

I mainly do C/Assembly for a living and haven't touched webdev stuff since I was ~14, and I haven't used Windows as my main OS since ~2008 so I'm quite a bit out of the loop here on both issues, and I'm sorry if I make some silly/outdated assumptions here, but that statement about PHP on Windows still comes a bit as a surprise to me.

Back in the day, we simply downloaded a WAMP/XAMPP package, which was a typical windows installer. The thing came with a simple management UI where you could e.g. point the document root to the root directory of your development tree and everything just worked. IIRC similar packages were floating around with other languages or Postgres instead of MySQL.

So what the hell happened since then? Why did those things get so complicated? Does the answer involve complexity introduced by container/scaling/management/IDE/framework/... software? Did installing Software on Windows become more difficult than simply running an installer? Doesn't Windows even have package management nowadays (chocolatey/some App store/...)? If it's so complicated, don't Windows devs nowadays have their trusty WSL anyway?

EDIT: I just looked around a bit on Google, apparently WAMP is still a thing, and Composer also has a Windows installer, which allegedly can work with the former (https://duvien.com/blog/setting-wamp-composer-and-git-window...).

[chwilson]

Things like Laragon (https://laragon.org/) have taken up the XAMPP mantle in recent years. Not sure about production (I moved away from Windows for dev stuff similarly), but developing with PHP on Windows has definitely got easier, imo.

[revskill]

Ah, there're some services that provide cli tool, which uses PHP.

First step to install that tool is to install php.

I don't want a web environment here, just a php with version in my system to install that tool, but failed. I don't know how to begin, try and failed. Hopelessly.