Google App Engine PHP Runtime now available to everyone

At Google I/O earlier this year, we added PHP, the fourth language runtime on Google App Engine in Limited Preview. Today we’re moving to Preview, making PHP on App Engine available for everyone immediately. It is no longer necessary to whitelist your application for deployment.



PHP is one of the world’s most popular programming languages for web programming today. Since the runtime was launched at Google I/O earlier this year, thousands of developers around the world have started using App Engine for PHP, taking advantage App Engine’s legendary scalability and ease of use to run popular PHP products like phpMyAdmin, Drupal and phpBB and frameworks such as Laravel, Silex and CodeIgniter. And as you would expect, you can use Google APIs such as Drive and Google+ on App Engine.



One early adopter of App Engine for PHP was VICE.com, who run the popular Motherboard blog. Motherboard receives millions of visitors a month, and runs on a long serving in-house CMS powered by the popular Yii PHP framework. Having moved Motherboard fully over to Google App Engine recently, “It's our opinion at VICE that Google is building the next generation PaaS,” said VICE.com CTO, Jesse Knight. “We're extremely excited to be early adopters.”



Since introducing the PHP runtime, we’ve made many improvements, including:

• Releasing our plugin for WordPress on Google App Engine


• Improving the ability to easily read and write files from PHP on App Engine


• Adding support for several important runtime extensions such as mbstring and mcrypt


• Adding support for App Engine Task Queues and Modules


• Substantial improvements to our developer SDKs


• Numerous performance and stability improvements

And it’s never been easier to develop, test and deploy your App Engine PHP application. If you work in the cloud, you can create, test and deploy your project from your browser using DevTable or CodeEnvy cloud IDEs. If you prefer working from your desktop, you can now build, locally run and debug, and deploy Google App Engine PHP applications right from within JetBrain’s PHPStorm IDE.



Developers interested in the PHP runtime now can create an account and deploy PHP applications immediately. And don’t forget to share your experiences (and your projects) with our Google+ community.



-Posted by Andrew Jessup, Product Manager