This is a simple script/tool written in python (3.4) to convert PHP scripts to static HTML pages. The goal is to convert an entire PHP website residing in localhost to a static HTML website altogether. This conversion can be done on a directory containing a website as well as on a single PHP script.

Mechanism:

The system on which this tool will be run, must have PHP installed. It executes every PHP script with the system PHP (CLI) environment and parses the output to replace markups as required and produces .html for each .php.

Install:

The script can be run without installing if python3.4 is available:

./php2html

On Unix/Linux:

The tool can be installed by running the install file provided, in any Linux System:

chmod +x install
sudo ./install   #Must be run within the package directory (with `./` at the beginning)

Or just copy the php2html script to /usr/bin

On Windows:

For windows, You can rename the file with a .py extension and run it within python environment. Or you can use cxfreeze to make a binary build for standalone executable. I may not provide any binary build of this tool anymore.

How to use:

Both Windows and Linux versions of this tool can be used the same way (In windows make sure to add the executable path in the PATH environment variable). It can be run with cmd in windows and with terminal emulator in Linux.

Simple Usage:

php2html phpscript.php
php2html . destination_directory  # This will convert entire site in current directory to html

Always run this command from within the Document Root of your website (public_html or www or whatever it is), otherwise unexpected results might occur.

Advanced Usage:

Usage: php2html src dest [options]

options: src dest -q -h --help -o -i -v --version -a.htaccess -rd

src : the source path. src can not be a directory other than current directory, to pass current directory as src, either use . or ./

dest : the destination directory.

-q : means quite (won't print any output other than errors) -q : can be placed anywhere in the argument sequence.

-h : shows this help menu --help : shows this help menu

-o : overwrites destination directory This mode is not dependent on the existance of destination directory

-i : is a dangerous option and should be avoided This replaces all the PHP files to resulting HTML file in the source directory. This doesn't require the option dest, neither it will prompt for it, and if dest is given as command line argument, it will simply ignore that

-v : shows version information --version : shows version info

-a.htaccess : processes the .htaccess file. Other access file can be processed by changing the .htaccess part to the actual name of the used AccessFile. There must not be any white space between -a and .htaccess If you pass only -a, it will neither look for any AccessFile and nor it will try to process them. If you don't pass -a as an option, it will look for .htaccess file by default

-rd : reserve Directory Structure. By default empty directory will not be copied to the destination directory. If -rd is specified, empty directory will also be copied to the destination to preserve directory structure

-ed : Exclude directory. The directory passed with this options won't be included in new html site.

-ef : Exclude file. The file specified by this option won't be included in new html site.

Example:
php2html
php2html . dest                        # . is the current dir
php2html -q src.php dest
php2html src.php -q dest
php2html src.php dest -q
php2html src.php dest -q -o            # This and above takes .htaccess by default as the access file
php2html src.php dest -q -o -a         # This one ignores any accessfile
php2html src.php dest -q -o -a.config  # This one takes .config as AccessFile

Limitations:

1. This tool only changes the relative PHP URLs to HTML URLs, no absolute URL is changed in any ways.
2. It's recommended that you use JavaScript (window.location.href or such) to get the current location not PHP ($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']), if you are gonna use that URL in any link which you need to be converted to html link, otherwise it may produce unexpected results.
3. If you want to use PHP variables: $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] or $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] see the tips & tricks section.
4. Use relative URL path as much as you can. If any relative URL is specified with absolute path (with http:// or www.), it will be ignored and won't be converted to HTML URL path.

Tips & Trics:

If you want to use $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] or $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] in a page, add the following lines at the top of the page:

<?php 
@chdir(rtrim(dirname($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']),'/')); 
//These pieces of codes must be the top most lines of the page.
   $__CURDIR=dirname($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);
   $__SELF=basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);
   $pat='/(\/|^)[^\/]*/';
   $__CURDIR = preg_replace('/^\.\//', '', $__CURDIR);
   $__CURDIR = preg_replace('/^\//', '', $__CURDIR);
   if($__CURDIR=='.'||$__CURDIR=='./'||$__CURDIR=='/'||$__CURDIR=='')
   {$__RDOCROOT='./';$__CURDIR='./';}
   else {$__RDOCROOT=preg_replace($pat,'../',$__CURDIR);$__CURDIR.="/";}
   $__CURDIR = $__RDOCROOT . $__CURDIR;
   $__SELF=$__CURDIR.$__SELF;
   //$__RDOCROOT and $__CURDIR contains a / at end. It's necessary
?>

1. Now you can use $__RDOCROOT or $GLOBALS['__RDOCROOT'] (inside a funcion, class or namespace) in place of $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].
2. $__CURDIR or $GLOBALS['__CURDIR'] (inside a funcion, class or namespace) in place of getcwd() or current directory.
3. $__SELF or $GLOBALS['__SELF'] (inside a funcion, class or namespace) in place of $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'].

All these new variables are relative paths not absolute ones.

Disclaimer:

This project emerged from personal needs. I liked to write webpages with PHP and host most of my project related pages on github while was not particularly interested on using Jekyll. That was the reason I wrote this script in the first place, to do the conversion from PHP to HTML. So this may not meet the needs of most of the PHP web developers out there.

It comes with a copy of GPL v3 License with no warranty of any kind, so use with care.

Contribute:

If you are a developer, you can consider contributing to this project by forking this repository and making changes for better and do a pull request, or sharing ideas and suggestions or finding bugs, anything at all, what you think will be beneficial for this project.

If you aren't a developer, but still want to contribute, then you can support the contributing developers spiritually, by starring the repository and sharing ideas. If you want to be notified of the continuous development, you can add this in your watch list in Github.

If you find any problems or bugs please open an issue here