I was working on the assumption that environment would be already set up for them. Setting up Apache to test stuff locally, getting FTP set up to get into your remote server, etc is all a pain with PHP too.

Once everything is set up, it's two-ish commands to commit and push to somewhere like Heroku.

And no, I haven't taught beginners at all, I'll fess up to that. I've learned alongside them, though. PHP is a perfectly cromulent language/framework for this sort of thing, but something like Flask could be just as accessible.