PHP is… the reason many of you turned to Ruby on Rails in the first place. It's also easy to get working on your Brightbox.
sudo apt-get install php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5
This will install everything you need for basic LAMP PHP support and immediately force a reload of Apache, interrupting service.
To install a php module, install the package and restart Apache:
sudo apt-get install php5-gd sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
The PHP config file is /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and will require normal reload of Apache to take effect:
sudo pico /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
We don't officially support PHP, in that we're not all PHP experts and we don't test it on our default images, but you shouldn't have any problems with it. It does work fine: our help desk software and wiki are PHP applications and they run in a Brightbox.