PHP Docker Official Images Hit the 1 Billion Downloads Milestone

Over the past decade, you've likely heard the narrative that PHP is dead, along with claims that PHP is a relic of the past, no one uses PHP anymore, or modern developers don't choose PHP.

These statements are not entirely without merit from certain perspectives, but at least the data suggests that PHP's demise is far from imminent, as its download figures remain impressively high.

PHP container images, the official images released by the PHP project team on Docker Hub, allow developers to quickly start PHP projects by simply pulling the image. This is incredibly convenient for developers working in containerized environments, and recently, the total number of pulls for this official image reached the milestone of 1 billion, indicating that PHP's popularity has hardly waned.

Indeed, modern developers have moved to more contemporary programming languages for building websites and projects. However, globally, countless websites are still built with PHP, including a vast number of CMS platforms, e-commerce sites, and business websites.

The well-known CMS WordPress runs on PHP and is used by hundreds of millions of websites worldwide (with 2024 data showing 810 million websites), a massive ecosystem unlikely to be replaced any time soon.

Another interesting statistic is that currently, 79% of all known server-side programming websites are powered by PHP, making PHP a pillar of web development with its popularity potentially set to grow even more.

Therefore, looking ahead over the next decade, the narrative that "PHP is dead" will likely persist, but this will have no impact on PHP. On the contrary, PHP will continue to be one of the hottest programming languages for development.