[KronisLV]

> I was just thinking fondly back to XAMPP...

Actually used XAMPP just a few years ago, for some quick and dirty PHP development, before eventually moving over to containerizing everything I needed for that project. It's still around and usable: https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html

Either way, nowadays I basically run all of my "business" applications in containers, because that's the lowest common denominator for isolated, scalable and relatively easily manageable environments that's not going anywhere (OCI seems too widespread now, even if something like Podman might displace Docker in particular somewhat).

That said, there's also something nice to be said about things running with fewer abstractions along the way locally (debugging can be easier in some tech stacks that way, instead of figuring out how to do remote debugging, same for other instrumentation like seeing all of the application threads/memory/SQL queries etc.), or a set of highly focused tools for a particular tech stack.

[jszymborski]

Honestly, I just use the newly built-in PHP web server for my hobby projects. I mostly develop with Laravel so just run the artisan server.

[iKlsR]

Same at times, sqlite driver etc but you quickly need redis or sqlite taps out on some more complicated or better supported framework feature you need.