Installing PHP on Windows

By Michael J. Ross
2008-03-05


Introduction

A brochure-style Web site may be sufficient for a business that simply wants a basic Web presence — some static pages to inform the visitor of the company's off-line contact information. But most organizations want a Web site that can interact with the visitor, delivering custom content in dynamically-generated pages, and storing visitor information in a database. Such a Web site requires several technologies: a Web server, a database system, and a scripting language for creating the Web pages. Currently the most popular choices are Apache, MySQL, and PHP, respectively.

Your PC can be turned into a fully capable Web development environment, by installing those three technologies, and configuring them so they communicate with one another. Admittedly, you can simply install and use PHP for its command-line processing. But for creating and testing dynamically generated Web pages on your local machine, then Apache needs to be already installed and working.

In this tutorial, we will go through the steps to install and configure PHP — as well as phpMyAdmin, an invaluable MySQL management application — on a Windows PC. We will assume that you already have the latest version of the Apache Web server installed and working. For detailed instructions on how to set up Apache on a Windows machine, please see my earlier tutorial, "Installing Apache on Windows".

You should install Apache before installing PHP, so the former will be in place when referenced during the PHP installation.

Tutorial Pages:
» Introduction
» PHP Already Installed?
» Downloading PHP
» Testing PHP
» Adding MySQL
» MySQL Versions of DLLs
» XAMPP

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