What you can build with PeachPie¶

Over the course of the 6+ years we’ve been developing the PHP compiler to .NET, many practical apps have been tried on PeachPie, both by the core developer team and by the community. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the coolest projects built with PeachPie.

What is PeachPie?¶

In case you’re new here, let’s briefly recap what PeachPie is and answer the iconic “But Why” question. PeachPie is a PHP compiler and runtime under .NET — a complete re-implementation of PHP in C#, capable of compiling PHP into CIL bytecode and thus fully interoperable with any language from the .NET family.

The idea behind PeachPie is primarily to allow two of the most popular web development technologies to co-exist, but there are other benefits to running PHP on .NET, e.g. performance enhancements, better security and arguably more professional tooling by Microsoft. The project has been under development since 2016 and is a part of the .NET Foundation.

WordPress on .NET, aka WpDotNet¶

Easily the most popular real-world app built with PeachPie is WpDotNet, i.e. WordPress running on .NET. This app is created by us, the developers of PeachPie, and is available as an SDK or full-blown project to play with. The truly mindblowing part of this project is that it’s distributed as a NuGet package and is injected into your existing solution by adding a package reference and then injecting WordPress as middleware within your Configure startup method, like so:

public class Startup
{
    public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
    {
        // ...
        app.UseWordPress();
        // ...
    }
}

MediaWiki¶

Even though the implementation is a little outdated by now, MediaWiki (the software that powers Wikipedia) is actually one of the largest and most complex apps we’ve ever managed to run on PeachPie.

You can use this project to run your own Wiki on .NET, although we admit that we haven’t tested this in a while. So if you do give it a shot and you end up running into problems, please do let us know.

Laravel¶

Perhaps the most ambitious community project ever attempted is to run Laravel on .NET. Unfortunately, the community member who was attempting to make this happen hasn’t given it a shot in 4 years, although we were extremely close to getting an error-free compilation of possibly the second most popular PHP app.

PeachPie’s development has made massive strides since then, so we assume that we’re likely not far from being able to run Laravel at this point. If you’re interested in making this happen, we’d love it if you gave it a shot and let us know what issues you run into.

Flarum¶

Probably the most sophisticated and popular discussion forum app, Flarum, would be a truly valuable addition to the .NET ecosystem. A community member is currently trying to achieve this quest — we have an open issue on this topic. Feel free to add to it!

Magento¶

Another massive PHP app that likely already works, but hasn’t properly been worked on since 2019, is Magento. This e-commerce platform, which is now part of Adobe, has received quite a bit of attention from the community and from us as well, as you can see by the amount of closed issues on this topic.

If you’d like to see Magento on .NET, give it a try and let us know how far you can get.

Are there any large-scale commercial apps running on PeachPie?¶

Yes, many. We frequently get the question of whether PeachPie is production-ready and capable of supporting major commercial projects, and the answer is clearly yes. Major Fortune 500 brands, including Volkswagen AG, for example, use PeachPie to power their mission-critical web apps.

We have clients from the media sector, electronics and insurance industry currently under commercial contracts to integrate their PHP apps with .NET via PeachPie.