PHP on Google App Engine

App Engine offers you a choice between two PHP language environments. Both environments have the same code-centric developer workflow, scale quickly and efficiently to handle increasing demand, and enable you to use Google’s proven serving technology to build your web, mobile and IoT applications quickly and with minimal operational overhead. While the two environments have a lot in common, they differ in a few important ways.

Choose your preferred environment

Standard environment

• Second generation PHP 7.2 (beta) beta runtime capable of running any framework, library, or binary.

• First generation PHP 5.5 runtime does not allow native code, filesystem access, or arbitrary network connections, and has proprietary APIs.

• Optimized to scale nearly instanteously to handle huge traffic spikes.

PHP 7.2 (beta) docs| PHP 5.5 docs

Flexible environment

• Open source runtimes capable of running any framework, library, or binary.

• Greater CPU and memory instance types.

• Code runs in Docker and is easily portable to GKE.

• PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1

View docs

Choosing an environment

You can run an App Engine application in two environments, the standard environment and the flexible environment. See a summary of differences between the two environments.

Learn more