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Getting Up and Running

know or can easily pick up how to make basic Web pages). You’ll also need to download, install, and

conﬁgure PHP, so we provide complete instructions about how to do these things in the coming sections.

Note that some conﬁguration options for PHP are related to very speciﬁc application requirements (you

don’t need to worry about them unless you need them) so many of the options aren’t discussed until you

reach the appropriate chapter.

System Requirements

To run the code in this book you will need at least the following software:

❑

Server software (an operating system such as Windows 2000 or Linux)

❑

A PHP-compatible Web server (such as Apache or Internet Information Server (IIS)

❑

PHP5 (get the download from www.php.net)

❑

A relational database system (starting at Chapter 9, we use SQLite or MySQL)

❑

A Web browser (such as IE, Mozilla, and so on)

❑

A text editor, such as Notepad, Emacs, vi, BBEdit, and so on.

You shouldn’t have to worry about hard drive space or RAM, unless you are working on a very old

system, or one that is overloaded. PHP doesn’t take up much room, and runs very efﬁciently.

You can run all of the software listed here on the same computer, for development purposes. If

you have access to several networked computers, you may want to install all of your server

software on one (typically either a UNIX or Windows NT/2000 computer), and use another networked

computer as your client machine. For the purposes of this book, we will generally assume you are

running all of the software on a single computer. This is the conﬁguration used by most

Web developers.

php.ini, the PHP Conﬁguration File

There are two examples of PHP conﬁguration ﬁles that come with PHP when you download it:

php.ini-dist and php.ini-recommended. After you download and install PHP, there will be one

ﬁle named php.ini strategically placed on your system, and each time PHP starts it will read this ﬁle

and set itself up accordingly. The php.ini ﬁle can be written out by hand, but of course most of us just

modify either the dist or recommended ﬁle to suit our needs, and then copy and rename it into the

appropriate folder.

However, you should note the following lines in the top of the dist ﬁle:

; This is the default settings file for new PHP installations.

; By default, PHP installs itself with a configuration suitable for

; development purposes, and *NOT* for production purposes.

The settings in the dist ﬁle are used for nearly all of the examples in this book and we’ll let you know

whenever the conﬁguration settings are changed. But you will want to use the recommended ﬁle when

you complete your applications and copy them over to your production server, and you should be aware