OpenWRT: Installing and Running PHP5

October 26, 2013 · 2 min read

What if you could run PHP scripts or applications your router? The aftermarket firmware OpenWRT allows you to install and run PHP easily in a snap! However dont expect to serve 1000 concurrent connections to a Wordpress installation hosted on your router! Lets get started.

And, if you didn’t know about OpenWRT, it is a third-party after-market firmware available for many routers. (You can think of it as Cyanogenmod for Routers)

What you need

A OpenWRT installed router with a external USB storage mounted as rootfs
A working internet connection

Installing Packages

Login to your routers shell via SSH.
Install the php5 and php5-cli package via opkg.

opkg install php5 php5-cli

Testing

Create a file named test.php in a location of your choice with the following text:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Run the following command in the directory with the file you just created. (Use your favorite port number here, if you dont like 9000)

php5-cli -S 0.0.0.0:9000

Open http://IP_OF_YOUR_ROUTER:PORT/test.php in your browser, in my case the URL is http://192.168.1.1:9000/test.php

opkg update
opkg list "php*"

And then install them as required by doing a simple opkg install!

Happy Hacking! :D