The first time I connected Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot, I expected party tricks. I got something closer to a new way of working. It wasn’t that code appeared by magic. It was that the little frictions, like the boilerplate, the glue code, the tests I knew I should write but kept postponing, stopped dominating my day. VS Code had already been my editor of choice for its ergonomics and extensibility; Copilot turned that editor into a cockpit where intention became motion. This post is my field report: what I actually run, how I prompt, where it saves time, and where I still slow down and think.

This post describes how to set up, run, and debug PHP code with Visual Studio Code running on Windows.

What do we need?

Compared to some other popular programming languages for the Web, PHP is missing some tools, so I created a shopping list to make the experience more complete.

Basically what we need is:

• the PHP runtime itself,
• a modern code editor with syntax highlighting,
• a debugger connected to our code editor,
• and a (development) webserver.

Runtime (PHP)

We start with the PHP runtime. The PHP runtime will pars en execute our .php files and outputs the HTML (or anything you want) back to you.