PHP - A Lightweight Dev Setup for Windows

Daniel Opitz

01 Jun 2025

I recently decided to remove my previous blog post about PHP development with WSL2. In theory, the approach looked promising, but in practice it proved to be impractical and too clunky. Tools like Xdebug were difficult to get up and running reliably, and the whole setup was too complex.

To keep things simple I put together a tiny Apache + PHP + MySQL setup script that runs natively on Windows without the overhead of containers.

You can find it here: https://github.com/odan/php-dev-box

Maybe in the next blog post I’ll take a look at scoop.sh (package manager) and nssm (non-sucking service manager) as another solution for PHP development.

If you have any good suggestions on how to install and use PHP with XDebug and PHPStorm, please write it into the comments.