PHP is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as output. However, it can also be used for command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP primarily acts as a filter. The PHP program takes input from a file or stream containing text and special PHP instructions and outputs another stream of data for display.