Say Hello To PHP Support in CodeSandbox

Welcome, PHP community 👋 We are super excited to introduce official support for PHP development environments in CodeSandbox. You can import or create any PHP project, code using our built-in LSP and grow it as big as you want.

We are the team building CodeSandbox—a cloud development platform that makes it incredibly easy to spin up a cloud environment and share it with others.

Even though we were originally focused on JavaScript and React, we have been quickly expanding to new languages like Rust and Python.

Since we introduced Docker support, our community started creating amazing projects that go way beyond front-end apps. Now, it’s time for PHP to truly shine—and you can get started right now by forking our starter template ✨

Developing PHP projects in the cloud

Even though we don’t use PHP that much at CodeSandbox, several people on our team have used it extensively for their projects. After all, PHP has a huge, thriving community that has launched exciting projects like Laravel.

We have made it a habit of talking with our users to understand how we can make CodeSandbox better for them and (surprise, surprise!) PHP was one of the most requested additions.

By adding official PHP support, we allow anyone to run a powerful cloud environment to develop PHP projects—for personal, work and open-source projects. Plus, we added Intelephense support with auto-completion, auto-formatting, linting and even type definitions (when applicable).

Alright, this is where things get fun—try it in action yourself by importing one of your GitHub repositories or by forking our starter template.

💡 You can also build PHP projects right from your iPad or iPhone with CodeSandbox for iOS!

Why you should move from local to CodeSandbox

So, why move from local to CodeSandbox? Two words: accessibility and speed.

Because it’s running in the cloud, anything you configure in your project will be immediately available behind a URL. When you share that with someone else (or even yourself if you change devices), the person on the other side can just keep coding without having to install anything.

This makes any codebase immediately super accessible! Want to share a bug repro with someone else or show a cool demo? Send a link to your branch or sandbox—we keep it always ready, with no setup required.

But what makes CodeSandbox truly shine is the fact that we’re collaborative by default, unlike any other cloud development environment you’ll find out there. It feels pretty much like Google Docs or Figma but for code.

You can do live sessions, pair programming, onboarding, follow others through the code… It’s a much better experience overall that accelerates innovation across the entire team.

Not ready to move away from your local environment yet? That’s completely understandable. But it doesn’t mean you can’t still get some benefits of cloud development.

This is one of the main reasons why we developed the CodeSandbox GitHub App. You can easily connect it to your GitHub repositories and we will give you an interactive preview for every PR. Super handy to make code reviews easier—anyone can open the PR, check the diff, see the code preview running alongside it, and review with the full context.

💡 If you have an open-source PHP repo and want to add CodeSandbox to make it easier for others to contribute, reach out or tweet @CodeSandbox—we offer special conditions for OSS teams.

Take your PHP projects to the next level

We could spend ages telling you all the things that we and our users love about CodeSandbox, but there's nothing quite like trying it for yourself.

To really make the most out of it, create a team and try our live collaboration, which has been described as a “brilliant, killer feature”.

And you can also take advantage of our free trial of Team Pro, which brings more powerful VM specs and allows you to keep your work private.

That’s it! We hope that CodeSandbox can help you and all the amazing folks in the PHP community create and grow their projects while making them more accessible.