This open-source PHP project (dirk1983/deepseek) is a tiny, framework-free web application that gives you a clean chat interface to DeepSeek’s models, including the full DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model, plus Stable Diffusion image generation. It has earned about 3,090 stars on GitHub and was last updated in 2025. The entire application is just a handful of PHP files, which makes it one of the simplest possible ways to put a DeepSeek-powered chat page on your own server.
The app calls DeepSeek’s API and streams answers token-by-token using the EventSource protocol, so responses appear as they are generated. The interface renders Markdown, mathematical formulas and syntax-highlighted code, keeps multi-turn conversation context, and adds a drawing mode that sends prompts to a Stable Diffusion model. Because it uses no framework and supports essentially all PHP versions, it can be dropped onto almost any shared hosting or VPS and customised by editing a few files, which is why it is popular as a learning project for PHP beginners.
A public demo instance accompanies the project so you can see the interface before installing anything. Installation is deliberately old-school: upload the files to any PHP-capable web space, add your DeepSeek API key to the configuration, and the chat page is live, with no build step, no Composer dependencies and no database to provision. That simplicity, plus the readable code and the step-by-step tutorial the author maintains, has made the repository a popular first project for PHP learners who want to understand how streaming LLM chat applications work under the hood.
The code is free and open source under the MIT license. Chatting uses your own DeepSeek API access, which is billed by DeepSeek according to its own pricing.
PHP developers and hobbyists who want a minimal, self-hosted DeepSeek chat page, or a readable starter project for learning how streaming LLM chat works.