PHP 5.4 comes with a flaming built-in web server. This server is (obviously) not suitable to use in production environments, but it’s great if we want to check one project quickly:
- git clone from github
- composer install to install dependencies
- run the built-in web server and test the application.
php -S localhost:8888 -t www/
But is very usual to use mod_rewrite or similar to send all requests to the front controller. With apache is pretty straight forward to do it:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA,L]
</IfModule>
But, does it work with the built-in web server? The answer is yes, but with another syntax. We only need to create one router file and start our server with this router:
<?php
// www/routing.php
if (preg_match('/\.(?:png|jpg|jpeg|gif)$/', $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"])) {
return false;
} else {
include __DIR__ . '/index.php';
}
And now we start the server with:
php -S localhost:8888 www/routing.php
Easy, isn’t it?
Gonzalo Ayuso - Web Architect 
Really like this as an alternative to .htaccess!
~Thanks
We rewrote this as it misses .js then did
$request_uri = __DIR__ . $_SERVER[“REQUEST_URI”];
if (file_exists($request_uri)) {
return false;
} else {
include __DIR__ . ‘/index.php’;
}
Hi,
Sensio has documented this feature :
http://silex.sensiolabs.org/doc/web_servers.html#php-5-4
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