Installation on Windows systems

Windows InstallShield

The Windows PHP installer available from the downloads page at http://www.php.net/, this installs the CGI version of PHP and, for IIS, PWS, and Xitami, configures the web server as well. Also note, that while the InstallShield installer is an easy way to make PHP work, it is restricted in many aspects, as automatic setup of extensions for example is not supported.

Install your selected HTTP server on your system and make sure that it works.

Run the executable installer and follow the instructions provided by the installation wizard. Two types of installation are supported - standard, which provides sensible defaults for all the settings it can, and advanced, which asks questions as it goes along.

The installation wizard gathers enough information to set up the php.ini file and configure the web server to use PHP. For IIS and also PWS on NT Workstation, a list of all the nodes on the server with script map settings is displayed, and you can choose those nodes to which you wish to add the PHP script mappings.

Once the installation has completed the installer will inform you if you need to restart your system, restart the server, or just start using PHP.

Manual Installation Steps

This install guide will help you manually install and configure PHP on your Windows webserver. You need to download the zip binary distribution from the downloads page at http://www.php.net/. The original version of this guide was compiled by Bob Silva, and can be found at http://www.umesd.k12.or.us/php/win32install.html.

This guide provides manual installation support for:

• Personal Web Server 3 and 4 or newer

• Internet Information Server 3 and 4 or newer

• Apache 1.3.x

• OmniHTTPd 2.0b1 and up

• Oreilly Website Pro

• Xitami

• Netscape Enterprise Server, iPlanet

PHP 4 for Windows comes in two flavours - a CGI executable (php.exe), and several SAPI modules (for example: php4isapi.dll). The latter form is new to PHP 4, and provides significantly improved performance and some new functionality.

If you choose one of the SAPI modules and use Windows 95, be sure to download the DCOM update from the Microsoft DCOM pages. For the ISAPI module, an ISAPI 4.0 compliant Web server is required (tested on IIS 4.0, PWS 4.0 and IIS 5.0). IIS 3.0 is NOT supported. You should download and install the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack with IIS 4.0 if you want native PHP support.

The following steps should be performed on all installations before the server specific instructions.

• Extract the distribution file to a directory of your choice. c:\php\ is a good start. You probably do not want to use a path in which spaces are included (for example: c:\program files\php is not a good idea). Some web servers will crash if you do.

• You need to ensure that the DLLs which PHP uses can be found. The precise DLLs involved depend on which web server you use and whether you want to run PHP as a CGI or as a server module. php4ts.dll is always used. If you are using a server module (e.g. ISAPI or Apache) then you will need the relevant DLL from the sapi folder. If you are using any PHP extension DLLs then you will need those as well. To make sure that the DLLs can be found, you can either copy them to the system directory (e.g. winnt/system32 or windows/system) or you can make sure that they live in the same directory as the main PHP executable or DLL your web server will use (e.g. php.exe, php4apache.dll).

  The PHP binary, the SAPI modules, and some extensions rely on external DLLs for execution. Make sure that these DLLs in the distribution exist in a directory that is in the Windows PATH. The best bet to do it is to copy the files below into your system directory, which is typically:

  c:\windows\system for Windows 9x/ME

  c:\winnt\system32 for Windows NT/2000

  c:\windows\system32 for Windows XP

  The files to copy are:

  php4ts.dll, if it already exists there, overwrite it

  The files in your distribution's 'dlls' directory. If you have them already installed on your system, overwrite them only if something doesn't work correctly (Before overwriting them, it is a good idea to make a backup of them, or move them to another folder - just in case something goes wrong).

  Download the latest version of the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) for your platform, especially if you use Microsoft Windows 9x/NT4. MDAC is available at http://www.microsoft.com/data/.

• Copy your chosen ini file (see below) to your '%WINDOWS%' directory on Windows 9x/Me or to your '%SYSTEMROOT%' directory under Windows NT/2000/XP and rename it to php.ini. Your '%WINDOWS%' or '%SYSTEMROOT%' directory is typically:

  c:\windows for Windows 9x/ME/XP

  c:\winnt or c:\winnt40 for NT/2000 servers

  There are two ini files distributed in the zip file, php.ini-dist and php.ini-optimized. We advise you to use php.ini-optimized, because we optimized the default settings in this file for performance, and security. The best is to study all the ini settings and set every element manually yourself. If you would like to achieve the best security, then this is the way for you, although PHP works fine with these default ini files.

• Edit your new php.ini file:

  • You will need to change the 'extension_dir' setting to point to your php-install-dir, or where you have placed your php_*.dll files. Please do not forget the last backslash. ex: c:\php\extensions\

  • If you are using OmniHTTPd, do not follow the next step. Set the 'doc_root' to point to your webservers document_root. For example: c:\apache\htdocs or c:\webroot

  • Choose which extensions you would like to load when PHP starts. See the section about Windows extensions, about how to set up one, and what is already built in. Note that on a new installation it is advisable to first get PHP working and tested without any extensions before enabling them in php.ini.

  • On PWS and IIS, you can set the browscap.ini to point to: c:\windows\system\inetsrv\browscap.ini on Windows 9x/Me, c:\winnt\system32\inetsrv\browscap.ini on NT/2000, and c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\browscap.ini on XP.

  • Note that the mibs directory supplied with the Windows distribution contains support files for SNMP. This directory should be moved to DRIVE:\usr\mibs (DRIVE being the drive where PHP is installed.)

  • If you're using NTFS on Windows NT, 2000 or XP, make sure that the user running the webserver has read permissions to your php.ini (e.g. make it readable by Everyone).

• For PWS give execution permission to the webroot:

  • Start PWS Web Manager

  • Edit Properties of the "Home"-Directory

  • Select the "execute"-Checkbox

Building from source

Before getting started, it is worthwhile answering the question: "Why is building on Windows so hard?" Two reasons come to mind:

1. Windows does not (yet) enjoy a large community of developers who are willing to freely share their source. As a direct result, the necessary investment in infrastructure required to support such development hasn't been made. By and large, what is available has been made possible by the porting of necessary utilities from Unix. Don't be surprised if some of this heritage shows through from time to time.

2. Pretty much all of the instructions that follow are of the "set and forget" variety. So sit back and try follow the instructions below as faithfully as you can.

Installation of Windows extensions

After installing PHP and a webserver on Windows, you will probably want to install some extensions for added functionality. The following table describes some of the extensions available. You can choose which extensions you would like to load when PHP starts by uncommenting the: 'extension=php_*.dll' lines in php.ini. You can also load a module dynamically in your script using dl().

The DLLs for PHP extensions are prefixed with 'php_' in PHP 4 (and 'php3_' in PHP 3). This prevents confusion between PHP extensions and their supporting libraries.