Is PHP Really Dead? Docker Pulls Hit 1 Billion, Proving Its Vitality

PHP Docker image reaches one‑billion pulls

The official PHP Docker image hosted on Docker Hub has been pulled more than one billion times. This metric indicates that developers continue to rely on the image for quickly provisioning PHP applications in containerised environments.

Using the official PHP Docker image

The image is published under the php repository on Docker Hub and includes several tags for different PHP versions and runtimes (e.g., php:8.2-apache, php:8.2-fpm, php:latest). A typical workflow to start a PHP web server is:

docker pull php:latest            # download the latest official image
docker run -d \
    -p 8080:80 \
    -v $(pwd)/src:/var/www/html \
    php:latest

This command pulls the image, maps host port 8080 to the container’s HTTP port, and mounts the local src directory as the web root, allowing immediate development without manual PHP installation.

Broader adoption of PHP

WordPress, the most widely deployed content‑management system, is built with PHP and powers roughly 810 million websites as of 2024. Independent surveys estimate that about 79 % of known server‑side web sites run on PHP, confirming its status as a foundational technology for the web.

These figures demonstrate that, despite recurring claims that “PHP is dead,” the language remains heavily used in production environments and is likely to stay a dominant choice for web development in the coming years.