It takes very little effort in php. You simply have your index.php and any public assets in the document root and then use index.php as a bootstrap to bring up your application. Everything else goes outside of the document root.

Yet, almost all well-known PHP applications don't have a public directory. And almost all non-PHP webapplications do have a public directory (e.g. practically all Python/Django and Ruby/Rails projects).

So the connection to PHP is apparent till today, although it may have to do more with crappy super-cheap hosting providers than with the language itself.

Very simple setup. You have:

    .git
    web/index.php
    src/*.php

Make the document root /full/path/to/web/index.php.

Edit: Also use a deployment tool like Capistrano which removes the .git directory as well.

Yes, it is easily avoided. But it is still violated by lots of PHP projects, including well-known projects with large userbases:

    * Wordpress
    * Tiki
    * ... and so on.

I don't think this is by accident: This technique is too old and well-known to be ignored by large projects. Rather, they conciously don't do that to cause less hassle for the occasional admin: Those can simply dump it into some directory and don't have to setup a proper docroot or anything. And extra work for those who want a more secure setup.

This is clearly a usability versus security issue, resolved in the unfortunate, usual way.

I don't have insight into the decision-making at WordPress, but they probably do this because they want to be compatible with as many web hosts as possible, and so many super-cheap shared hosts just give you a public directory that you're supposed to dump everything in.

It's possible to set it up properly on most of these hosts, but it's much more difficult, and if you ever have issues the support team says you're using a "non-supported configuration." At least WordPress lets you move your config file one level above the webroot and will find it automatically.

Drupal, MediaWiki, Laravel, Slim, it's a pretty long list, and it includes projects that target Serious Devlopers.

Also, this is really PHP specific.

Look at any larger Python (Django/Flask/...) or Ruby (Rails/...) project, and you will always find a proper "public" directory, although it may be named differently.

Not sure about Perl though ...

Does it? If you're on a shared host with just the one directory, maybe. But if you are configuring your own server, you still point it to htdocs and keep the config below it.