4. PHP Environment Setup

 

4. PHP Environment Setup

In order to develop and run PHP Web pages, three vital components need to be installed on your computer system.

Web Server - PHP will work with virtually all Web Server software, including Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) but then most often used is freely available Apache Server. Download Apache for free here: http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi

Database - PHP will work with virtually all database software, including Oracle and Sybase but most commonly used is freely available MySQL database. Download MySQL for free here: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/index.html

PHP Parser - In order to process PHP script instructions, a parser must be installed to generate HTML output that can be sent to the Web Browser. This tutorial will guide you how to install PHP parser on your computer.

1.          4.1. PHP Parser Installation

This section will guide you to install and configure PHP over the following four platforms:

·         - PHP Installation on Linux or Unix with Apache

·         -  PHP Installation on Mac OS X with Apache

·         - PHP Installation on Windows NT/2000/XP with IIS

·        -  PHP Installation on Windows NT/2000/XP with Apache

1.          4.2. PHP Installation on Linux or Unix with Apache

If you plan to install PHP on Linux or any other variant of Unix, then here is the list of prerequisites:

·         The PHP source distribution http://www.php.net/downloads.php

                    The latest Apache source distribution

                    http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi

·         A working PHP-supported database, if you plan to use one ( For example MySQL, Oracle etc. )

·         Any other supported software to which PHP must connect (mail server, BCMath package, JDK, and so forth)

·         An ANSI C compiler

·         Gnu make utility - you can freely download it at

                    http://www.gnu.org/software/make

                    Now here are the steps to install Apache and PHP5 on your Linux or Unix machine. If your

                    PHP or Apache versions are different, then please take care accordingly.

·         If you haven't already done so, unzip and untar your Apache source distribution. Unless you have a reason to do otherwise, /usr/local is the standard place.

1.      4.3. PHP Installation on Mac OS X with Apache

Mac users have the choice of either a binary or a source installation. In fact, your OS X probably came with Apache and PHP preinstalled. This is likely to be quite an old build,and it probably lacks many of the less common extensions.

However, if all you want is a quick Apache + PHP + MySQL/PostgreSQL setup on your laptop, this is certainly the easiest way to fly. All you need to do is edit your Apache configuration file and turn on the Web server.

So just follow the steps given below:

·         Open the Apache config file in a text editor as root.

·         Edit the file. Uncomment the following lines:

1.     4.4. PHP Installation on Windows NT/2000/XP with IIS

The Windows server installation of PHP running IIS is much simpler than on Unix, since it

involves a precompiled binary rather than a source build.

If you plan to install PHP over Windows, then here is the list of prerequisites:

·         A working PHP-supported Web server. Under previous versions of PHP, IIS/PWS was the easiest choice because a module version of PHP was available for it; but PHP now has added a much wider selection of modules for Windows.

·         A correctly installed PHP-supported database like MySQL or Oracle etc. (if you plan to use one)

·         The PHP Windows binary distribution (download it atwww.php.net/downloads.php)

·         A utility to unzip files (search http://download.cnet.com for PC file compression utilities)

Now here are the steps to install Apache and PHP5 on your Windows machine. If your PHP

version is different, then please take care accordingly.

·         Extract the binary archive using your unzip utility; C:\PHP is a common location.

·         Copy some .dll files from your PHP directory to your systems directory (usually C:\Winnt\System32). You need php5ts.dll for every case. You will also probably need to copy the file corresponding to your Web server module -C:\PHP\Sapi\php5isapi.dll. It's possible you will also need others from the dlls subfolder - but start with the two mentioned above and add more if you need them.

·         Copy either php.ini-dist or php.ini-recommended (preferably the latter) to your Windows directory (C:\Winnt or C:\Winnt40), and rename it php.ini. Open this file in a text editor (for example, Notepad). Edit this file to get configuration directives; We highly recommend new users set error reporting to E_ALL on their development machines at this point. For now, the most important thing is the doc_root directive under the Paths and Directories section. make sure this matches your IIS Inetpub folder (or wherever you plan to serve out of).

·         Stop and restart the WWW service. Go to the Start menu -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Services. Scroll down the list to IIS Admin Service. Select it and click Stop. After it stops, select World Wide Web Publishing Service and click Start. Stopping and restarting the service from within Internet Service Manager will not suffice. Since this is Windows, you may also wish to reboot.

·         Open a text editor. Type: <?php phpinfo(); ?>. Save this file in your Web server's document root as info.php.

·         Start any Web browser and browse the file.you must always use an HTTP request (http://www.testdomain.com/info.php or http://localhost/info.php or http://127.0.0.1/info.php) rather than a filename (/home/httpd/info.php) for the file to be parsed correctly

You should see a long table of information about your new PHP installation message

Congratulations!

2.      4.5. PHP Installation on WindowsNT/2000/XP with Apache

To install Apache with PHP 5 on Windows follow the following steps. If your PHP and Apache versions are different, then please take care accordingly.

·         Download Apache server from www.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/win32. You want the current stable release version with the no_src.msi extension. Double-click the installer file to install; C:\Program Files is a common location. The installer will also ask you whether you want to run Apache as a service or from the command line or DOS prompt. We recommend you do not install as a service, as this may cause problems with startup.

·         Extract the PHP binary archive using your unzip utility; C:\PHP is a common location.

·         Copy some .dll files from your PHP directory to your system directory (usually C:\Windows). You need php5ts.dll for every case. You will also probably need to copy the file corresponding to your Web server module -C:\PHP\Sapi\php5apache.dll. to your Apache modules directory. It's possible that you will also need others from the dlls subfolder, but start with the two mentioned previously and add more if you need them.

·         Copy either php.ini-dist or php.ini-recommended (preferably the latter) to your Windows directory, and rename it php.ini. Open this file in a text editor (for example, Notepad). Edit this file to get configuration directives; At this point, we highly recommend that new users set error reporting to E_ALL on their development machines

·         Tell your Apache server where you want to serve files from and what extension(s

you want to identify PHP files (.php is the standard, but you can use .html, .phtml, or whatever you want). Go to your HTTP configuration files (C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache\conf or whatever your path is), and open httpd.conf with a text editor. Search for the word DocumentRoot (which should appear twice) and change both paths to the directory you want to serve files out of. (The default is C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache\htdocs.). Add at least one PHP extension directive as shown in the first line of the following code:

1.      4.6. Apache Configuration for PHP

Apache uses httpd.conf file for global settings, and the .htaccess file for per-directory access settings. Older versions of Apache split up httpd.conf into three files (access.conf, httpd.conf, and srm.conf), and some users still prefer this arrangement.

Apache server has a very powerful, but slightly complex, configuration system of its own. Learn more about it at the Apache Web site: www.apache.org

The following section describes settings in httpd.conf that affect PHP directly and cannot be set elsewhere. If you have standard installation, then httpd.conf will be found at /etc/httpd/conf:

Timeout

This value sets the default number of seconds before any HTTP request will time out. If you set PHP's max_execution_time to longer than this value, PHP will keep grinding away but the user may see a 404 error. In safe mode, this value will be ignored; you must use the timeout value in php.ini instead

Document Root

Document Root designates the root directory for all HTTP processes on that server. It looks something like this on Unix:

1.      4.7. PHP.INI file Configuration

The PHP configuration file, php.ini, is the final and most immediate way to affect PHP's functionality. The php.ini file is read each time PHP is initialized.in other words, whenever httpd is restarted for the module version or with each script execution for the CGI version. If your change isn’t showing up, remember to stop and restart httpd. If it still isn’t showing up, use phpinfo() to check the path to php.ini.