Datasheet

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WY027-01 WY027-Mercer WY027-v2.cls June 5, 2004 0:44

Chapter 1

that you may need to rewrite your code a little bit to work properly with the recommended ﬁle’s

conﬁguration settings. We’ll discuss this more as we go along.

Setting Up a Test Machine

In this chapter, we’ll walk through setting up PHP5 on a Red Hat Linux machine running the Apache

Web server, as well as on a Windows 2000 machine running Internet Information Server (IIS). You can run

PHP5 with many other operating systems and Web servers, so see the PHP5 documentation for

installation and conﬁguration on other servers. And there are a variety of installation methods you can

use. For example, there is an automatic installer for the Windows version, whereas you can install the

Linux version using RPMs (for some versions of Linux), and you can also download and compile the

Linux versions from the original source code if you like. None of the installations are all that difﬁcult if

you follow procedures correctly, and the examples we provide are a good starting point for many of the

installations available.

There are some third-party installers (often open-source and free) out there, if you want to look for them.

For instance, you might try PHPTriad or Foxserv in Google.

Network Connections

If you don’t already know, a computer doesn’t need to be attached to the Internet, or even to a network,

to run Web server software. If you install a Web server on a computer, it’s always possible to access that

Web server from a Web browser running on the same machine, even if it doesn’t have a network card or

modem. Of course, to download and install the software you need, you have to have access to an Internet

connection. But you don’t need it to be active just because you’re running your Web server.

Once you have a Web server installed and running, you’ll install PHP5 alongside it. There’s some

conﬁguration required to tell the Web server how to run PHP programs, and we’ll walk through that

process before we start PHP. There is an automatic installer to be found with most distributions of PHP;

we’ll use a primarily manual process to illustrate what’s happening during installation.

What if it goes wrong? The README and INSTALL ﬁles that are included in most PHP

downloads, as well as the PHP manual at www.php.net/manual/, provide detailed

information which may be more up-to-date than the information here, which covers

the PHP5.0.2 release.

Where Do You Start?

There are two main installation paths from which to choose, and each simply depends on which

operating system you’re using:

❑

Installing PHP5 with the Apache Web Server on Linux (we use Red Hat Fedora Linux)

❑

Installing PHP5 with Microsoft Internet Information Server on Windows (we use Windows 2000)