Programming Social Applications

Installing on Windows

Once the Apache HTTP server has been installed, we can download PHP and make it available for the environment. Simply follow these steps to be able to run files from http://localhost:

1. To download the source files for PHP, go to http://windows.php.net/download/ and click the Zip option under the Thread Safe versions for the latest stable release.

   Warning

   Make sure that you download the Thread Safe version for PHP; otherwise, the required .dll files for Apache will not be present.

2. Once the files are downloaded, unzip them to C:\php.

3. Go to the C:\php directory and rename php.ini-production to php.ini. This will be the configuration file for PHP.

4. Now go to your Apache HTTP server installation directory and into the /conf folder. Open httpd.conf for editing. This is the configuration file for the server.

5. Add the two following lines where applicable in the file (with the other LoadModule lines):

   LoadModule php5_module "c:/php/php5apache2_2.dll"
   AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php

   Warning

   Make sure that the appropriate php5apache2_2.dll file is present within the C:\php directory before adding it. There may be permutations on the filename. The appropriate file should be a .dll that starts with php5apache2.

6. Restart your Apache server.

You will now be able to run .php files from the Apache HTTP server. For instance, if you create test.php in the HTTP server /htdocs directory, you will be able to load it at http://localhost/test.php from your browser.