So, the weekend is here, and i had a go at FrankenPHP.
I had a small static html page and a laravel application , i discovered a few things :
1: in Linux in general ( Manjaro for me ) access to ports below 1024 is reserved for root user ( privileged ) , so unless you want to run your web-server as root ( very very bad idea ) you can’t use port 80, or 443 for that matter.
2: your root path must be complete, the ‘~’ operator is not parsed it seems unless i missed something , which is a bit annoying sine now you will be revealing your home folder name , which also would reveal your user name on your system ( not liking this , hopefully it will be fixed soon. ) so in my example i will blot this one out ( sorry ).
3: FrankenPHP documentation leaves a lot to be desired. it should be made immediately clear that the Caddyfile needs to be in the same folder the frankenphp is started in ( i ended up with 3 different Caddyfiles lol )
4: in order to use ports other than the default , there is no command line option to specify the port, that is a true bummer, the documentation doesn’t even mention that, it just starts talking about putting it in a dockerfile ( which i just didn’t want to do ) the mention that the alternative ( non privileged port can only be specified in a Caddyfile )
5: you must use a frankenphp global setting to make it work with frankenphp , fine …
so what did i end up with:
<pre><code>{
	frankenphp
}

:8000
# for laravel you need to run it from the root folder , put your Caddtfile there too, and point this line to the /public folder ... don&#x27;t run it from inside /public lol 
root * /home/zzzZzzz/src/2025/05/lawnmowing
# root * /~/src/2025/05/lawnmowing

encode zstd br gzip
try_files {path} {path}/ /index.html
file_server
handle {
	try_files {path} {path}/ /index.php
	php_server
}
</code></pre>
In summery , this thing is awesome, insta ssl on your localhost and is quite fast , the best thing since sliced bread , certainly a keeper for my future projects in development, and likely in production too , now to see if there is a caddy-proxy-manager akin to the nginx-proxy-manager project and we will be set for small scale , secure virtual hosting …

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Exploring FrankenPHP for the first time reveals insights about Linux port restrictions, path requirements, and challenges with documentation. The author finds it promising for future projects due to its speed and ease of setting up SSL on localhost.

trying out frankenPHP for the first time