PHP with any of sqlite, MySQL, or Postgres. Those have almost no dev environment required other than vim/emacs and command-line tools (screen/tmux, ctags, rg/grep, sed, awk, etc.).
I use Go with different database back-ends, with vim and CLI tools. Nothing fancy required, Go comes with everything you need.
Doesn't PHP require a whole LAMP/LEMP stack? You need a web server, the PHP runtime, something like PHP-FPM in between, and a database server at the least. In production you'd probably also have to add Varnish and maybe Redis. I wouldn't exactly call that a lightweight dev environment. You'd need to replicate/containerize that whole stack, along with many config files, if you want a reproducible dev environment. The difficulty of managing that stack is why there are entire utils (like XAMPP or MAMP) and businesses (Pantheon, Acquia, Wpengine, etc.) that have sprung up around it.
By contrast, something like JS can be deployed as just a single function or a self-contained project folder with just Node. And you have sites like codesandbox/codepen/stackblitz that can host your entire dev environment as a webpage.
PHP has a built-in web server good enough for development. Go can serve HTTP without Apache or nginx as well. sqlite runs in-process, no need for a database server. No need for varnish or containers for a “lightweight dev environment.”
“Many config files” maybe happens with larger scale production systems but OP didn’t ask about that.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 20.3 ms ] threadI use Go with different database back-ends, with vim and CLI tools. Nothing fancy required, Go comes with everything you need.
By contrast, something like JS can be deployed as just a single function or a self-contained project folder with just Node. And you have sites like codesandbox/codepen/stackblitz that can host your entire dev environment as a webpage.
PHP has a built-in web server good enough for development. Go can serve HTTP without Apache or nginx as well. sqlite runs in-process, no need for a database server. No need for varnish or containers for a “lightweight dev environment.”
“Many config files” maybe happens with larger scale production systems but OP didn’t ask about that.