Programming PHP

Installing PHP

PHP is available for many operating systems and platforms. The most common setup, however, is to use PHP as a module for the Apache web server on a Unix machine. This section briefly describes how to install Apache with PHP. If you’re interested in running PHP on Windows, see Chapter 15, which explains your many options.

To install Apache with PHP, you’ll need a Unix machine with an ANSI-compliant C compiler, and around 5 MB of available disk space for source and object files. You’ll also need Internet access to fetch the source code for PHP and Apache.

Start by downloading the source distributions of PHP and Apache. The latest files are always available from http://www.php.net and http://www.apache.org, respectively. Store the files in the same directory, so that you have:

-rw-r--r--   1 gnat  wheel  2177983 Oct  9 09:34 apache_1.3.22.tar.gz 
-rw-r--r--   1 gnat  wheel  3371385 Dec 10 14:29 php-4.1.1.tar.gz

Now uncompress and extract the distributions:

# gunzip -c apache_1.3.22.tar.gz | tar xf -
# gunzip -c php-4.1.1.tar.gz | tar xf -

Each distribution unpacks into its own subdirectory, as follows:

drwxr-xr-x   8 gnat  wheel      512 Dec 16 11:26 apache_1.3.22
drwxr-xr-x  16 gnat  wheel     2048 Dec 21 23:48 php-4.1.1

The next step is to configure Apache, then configure PHP, telling it where the Apache source is and specifying the various other features that you want built into PHP. You’ll probably want to customize the configurations of Apache and PHP. For instance, provide the --prefix=/some/path ...