phpMan

Unix Man Page / Perldoc / Info Page Web Interface

About

phpMan is a single-file PHP web interface for Unix man, perldoc, info, and apropos commands. It makes it easier to read lengthy manual pages in your browser — with syntax highlighting, section navigation, and a floating table of contents.

Originally created in 2002 by Che Dong, phpMan has been continuously maintained and is compatible with PHP 8.x on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD.

PHP 8.x GPLv2 Single-file XHTML 1.0 Markdown output SEO meta TOC sidebar

Screenshot

phpMan: perldoc page rendered with syntax highlighting and TOC sidebar
Perldoc page with syntax highlighting and floating TOC sidebar

Live Demo

The phpMan demo is hosted on chedong.com with full PHP support. Try it now:

🚀 Launch phpMan Demo

Direct link: https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php

Features

Man Pages — Browse any Unix/Linux manual page by section
Perldoc — Read Perl module documentation in-browser
Info Pages — View GNU info documentation
Apropos Search — Full-text search across man page summaries
TOC Sidebar — Two-level floating table of contents for navigation
Markdown Output — Append /markdown for machine-readable format
SEO Optimized — Canonical URLs, meta tags, robots directives
Clean URLs — PATH_INFO routing: /man/ls/1

Quick Start

Deploy phpMan on any PHP 8.x server with a single file:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://git.code.sf.net/p/phpunixman/code phpman

# Copy to your web server's document root
cp phpman/phpMan.php /var/www/html/

# Access in browser
# https://your-server/phpMan.php

For Apache 2.x, ensure AcceptPathInfo On is configured to enable clean URL routing.

Links