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by gee_totes 5077 days ago
I'm a bit surprised there isn't a buildpack for PHP. It seems like there would be a demand, since PHP it so popular (I know I would definitely use it).

I wonder if it's because modern PHP apps (such as Symfony) have some external dependencies (such as on the APC cache).

4 comments

There is, it's just not officially supported: https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php . Github lists it as having 82 forks, so people are definitely playing around with this.
Yep. You can even run Wordpress with our fork: https://github.com/Americastestkitchen/heroku-wordpress-php/
How do you deal with uploaded files/persistent storage?
S3. Ignore the scary warning, this plugin works great for us: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tantan-s3/
Surprised it's using mod_php instead of PHP-FPM
I was disappointed by Heroku's lack of PHP support while speccing a recent project.

Happy to see that there is "unofficial" support for it at the moment. Competition is a good thing!

I've heard good things about http://www.appfog.com/ who used to specialize in heroku-esque PHP deployments. Perhaps they'd be worth checking out.
Their site seems to be down... see http://appfog.com/products/phpfog/pricing/
Yes, you have to love the myopia and revisionist definition of the statement "Run and scale any type of app. Run any web or background process with any web framework or worker type. "

Really Heroku? Any web framework? I guess PHP and ASP.NET aren't web frameworks any longer.

Not to be a jerk, but you've been able to run PHP on Heroku for quite a while now, even without buildpacks. Create a facebook app and set language to PHP and you're good to go. Also, if you look at the heroku facebook php template app, there is minimal config needed to run php on heroku.

Also, PHP is not a web framework, it's a language.

If you compare it to things called web frameworks in other languages, PHP is a language and a web framework (or, if you like, which provides a highly integrated default framework).
Using PHP on Heroku has never been straightforward. They don't even mention PHP in this post, and the instructions you've given are fairly undiscoverable. Ignorance of the possibility of running PHP on Heroku is more than excusable.