Installing Yii2 Starter Kit under Localhost

I am a complete newbie at Yii2 Frameworks and I have been recommended to install the Yii2 Starter Kit to get a web framework up fast (see https://github.com/trntv/yii2-starter-kit).

I am trying to install the kit in a local development environment with PHPStorm and the in-built web-server. I have followed all the (applicable) instructions in the setup guide here:

https://github.com/trntv/yii2-starter-kit/blob/master/docs/installation.md#important-notes

After installation, I can't seem to browse any of my localhost urls (http://):

localhost:63342/yii-starter-kit

localhost:63342/yii-starter-kit/backend

localhost:63342/yii-starter-kit/frontend

Nor if my PHPStorm startup folder is set to the "yii-startup-kit" project folder:

localhost:63342/

I seem to be left with an installation that has no index.php in the root project folder, nor in backend or frontend folders so hence when I browse anywhere I get a "The requested resource was not found on this server" error. Could someone tell me what I am missing? Is it a requirement to run under Vagrant/Docker (VMs?).

Thank you.

P.S. I have also seen this question: Error deploying yii2-starter-kit Yii2 installation, however from what I can see, the Yii Starter kit now works in a single domain mode.

It appears that (for some reason) Yii2-starter-kit is designed to "rewrite" all the backend and frontend URLs. This implies that PHP's simple in-built server can't handle the task (without doing quite a bit of fiddling to implement a PHP-based rewrite rule).

In the end, installing Apache was the only solution to get the framework to work. This requires implementing the "virtual host" configuration mentioned in the Installation Guide.