For beginners, it’s so important to see the source code of finished projects. It’s a good learning method to view the architecture, the coding techniques and how professional coders write clean, commented and maintainable code. Intermediate programmers can also benefit from this, depending on the scale and complexity of the project. There is no better way to achieve that than downloading the source code of open source projects. The following five web services are the most popular and reliable sources.

1. GitHub.com [→]

If you are familiar with Git version control system. GitHub is a Git repository web-based hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management. It’s the most popular online service of its kind, hosting more than 10 million repositories of different programming languages. You can find a very wide variety of stable and also under-development PHP projects that you can download with a click of a button.

2. Source-Forge.net [→]

Another very popular web-based source code repository. It is a centralized location for software developers to control and manage free and open-source software development. It also contains project in different programming languages including PHP. It currently hosts more that 430,000 repositories and it hosts some of the most popular open-source projects.

3. Compilr.com [→]

Compilr is originally a learning platform that has a web-based editor which allows to write code and execute it all from the browser. In addition, it contains a good library for open source projects that are created by its users.

4. 1000PHPprojects.org [→]

Through this link you can get free PHP Projects for final year students. It’s recommended for beginners since the projects are written by students and usually won’t include advanced coding skills.

5. FreeCode.com [→]

It’s a discontinued project so beware that it may contain unstable and outdated projects. But it has been the Web’s largest index of Linux, Unix and cross-platform software, and mobile applications. Despite, the discontinuation it is still a good source for projects code that you may get updated versions for them through other source.