DS Log

In my blog, I delve into the world of programming web technologies, Linux, Unix-like, and graphic design using free tools on Linux.

Saturday, November 29, 2025

PHP development server is stuck in a loop

The PHP built-in development server, introduced in PHP 5.4, is a command-line tool that allows developers to quickly spin up a basic web server to test PHP applications locally without the need to install and configure a full-featured server like Apache or Nginx. It's a huge convenience for development and testing, but it has key limitations that make it unsuitable for production.
Sometimes for some reason PHP server gets stuck in a lopp where you can't quit the server app. To solve this I have created start and stop bash scripts.

start.sh

 php -S localhost:9876

stop.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

PATTERN='php -S localhost:9876'

pids=$(ps aux | grep -F "$PATTERN" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}')

if [ -z "$pids" ]; then
  echo "No matching php process found for: $PATTERN"
  exit 0
fi

echo "Found PIDs: $pids"
for pid in $pids; do
  echo "Killing PID $pid..."
  kill "$pid" 2>/dev/null || true
done

sleep 1

for pid in $pids; do
  if kill -0 "$pid" 2>/dev/null; then
    echo "PID $pid still running; force killing..."
    kill -9 "$pid" 2>/dev/null || true
  else
    echo "PID $pid terminated."
  fi
done

posted by damirs @ November 29, 2025