These questions were shown only to the developers who chose PHP as one of their three primary programming languages.

PHP

Shares of PHP as primary programming language by country or region

43%34%33%33%32%31%30%28%27%26%24%23%FranceNorthern Europe and BeneluxUnited KingdomAfrica, Middle East, Central AsiaGermanySpainOther EuropeEast Europe, Balkan and CaucasusUnited StatesOther South-East Asia and OceaniaBrazilLatin America
All results

The popularity of PHP is still the highest in France: 43% of French developers use it as a primary language, which is 5 percentage points more than last year.

Which version of PHP do you regularly use?

1%34%76%37%26%11% 8%13% 3% 0%I'm not surePHP 8.0PHP 7.4PHP 7.3PHP 7.2PHP 7.1PHP 7.0PHP 5.6PHP 5.5 or olderOther

PHP 7.4 usage continued to grow over the past year. Now it is the most popular PHP version (76%, 32 percentage points added since 2020). The new PHP 8.0 is also rapidly growing and 34% of PHP developers said they use it.

Which PHP development environments do you regularly use?

74%Local
45%Containerized (Docker,Rocket)
38%Remote (SFTP, SSH,Remote desktop, etc.)
16%Virtualized (Vagrant, Otto,etc.)
1%Other

The majority of PHP developers are using local environments (74%). The share of containerized environments hasn’t grown over the last year and remains at 45%.

How do you usually debug PHP code?

Using PHP functions (var_dump(), die(), dd(), dump(), etc.)
Using a debugger (Xdebug, Zend Debugger, phpdbg)
Other
68%29%3%

Which PHP frameworks and platforms do you regularly use?

67%24%22% 9% 6% 5% 5% 4% 4% 3% 2% 7% 7%LaravelSymfonyWordPressCodeIgniterYiiSlimDrupalZendCakePHPMagentoJoomla!OtherNone

The popularity of Laravel has increased massively in the last year (from 50% to 67%). The shares of Symfony (24%) and WordPress (22%) remain similar to before.

Do you use any libraries or frameworks for asynchronous PHP?

84%I don’t use any
7%ReactPHP
7%Swoole
2%Amp
2%Other

The usage of async tools has not changed significantly since last year. But with Fibers accepted for PHP 8.1 and the Laravel Octane release planned for 2021, we may see an increased awareness and adoption of async techniques in PHP.

How do you run your PHP applications in production?

70%19% 9% 6%16%php-fpmmod_phpServerless (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, GCP Functions, etc.)OtherI have no idea

Which editor / IDE do you mostly use for PHP development?

63%24% 4% 4% 1% 1% 1% 2%PhpStormVS CodeIntelliJ IDEA Ultimate with PHP pluginSublime TextVimNotepad++AtomOther

Despite all the measures we’ve taken to secure a representative pool of respondents, the results may be slightly shifted towards users of JetBrains products, as they are more likely to take the survey.

Which testing frameworks do you regularly use?

63% 6% 5% 3% 2% 1% 1% 1%28% 6%PHPUnitPestCodeceptionBehatPHPSpecInfectionOtherSimpleTestI don’t write tests for PHPI write tests, but don’t use any frameworks

Writing tests has become more common among PHP developers (72%, an increase of 8 percentage points). PHPUnit usage (63%) has increased by 13 percentage points. The breakthrough award goes to Pest which was first released in 2020, but already has a 6% share.

What additional quality tools do you use regularly?

33%29%18%15% 9% 8% 5% 2% 2%45%PHP CS FixerPHP_CodeSnifferPHPStanPhp Inspections ​(EA Extended)PsalmPHPMDPHP InsightsPhanOtherNone

Do you use static analysis?

PHP
Other developers
33%/40%38%/33%28%/27%YesNoI don't know what static analysis is

The popularity of static analysis tools in the PHP ecosystem continues to grow. Although, when compared to other languages, PHP’s static analysis adoption is still below average.

If you are looking into static analysis for PHP projects, consider Qodana, which lets you run PhpStorm checks on CI in a Docker container.

What template engines do you use?

54%26% 8% 4% 3%20% 7%BladeTwigSmartyOtherMustacheNone, I use pure PHPNone, I don’t render HTML

What tools for profiling or measuring performance do you use?

20%18%17%11% 7% 3% 2%49%Xdebug ProfilerIn code timers (Manual timestamps, PHPBench, Toolbars, etc.)HTTP load testing (ab, siege, etc.)Application performance monitoring (New Relic, Tideways, etc.)Blackfire.ioXHProfOtherNone

What types of software do you develop with PHP?

81%27%24%15%14%11% 9% 6% 5%WebsitesUtilitiesDatabase / Data StorageLibraries / FrameworksSystem SoftwareFinanceIT InfrastructureBusiness Intelligence / Data Science / Machine LearningEntertainment
All results

PHP is still primarily used to develop websites (81%), while another relatively common field of implementation is utilities (27%).

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