Chapter 3. Installation
Table of Contents
General Installation Considerations ........................................................................................................ 10
Unix/HP-UX installs ............................................................................................................................ 11
Unix/Linux installs .............................................................................................................................. 12
Unix/Mac OS X installs ........................................................................................................................ 12
Unix/OpenBSD installs ........................................................................................................................ 14
Unix/Solaris installs ............................................................................................................................. 15
Installation on UNIX systems ................................................................................................................ 16
Installation on Windows systems ............................................................................................................ 17
Servers-CGI/Commandline ................................................................................................................... 26
Servers-Apache .................................................................................................................................. 26
Servers-Apache 2.0 ............................................................................................................................. 29
Servers-Caudium ................................................................................................................................ 32
Servers-fhttpd ..................................................................................................................................... 32
Servers-IIS/PWS ................................................................................................................................. 33
Servers-Netscape and iPlanet ................................................................................................................. 35
Servers-OmniHTTPd Server ................................................................................................................. 38
Servers-Oreilly Website Pro .................................................................................................................. 39
Servers-Sambar .................................................................................................................................. 39
Servers-Xitami ................................................................................................................................... 39
Servers-Other web servers .................................................................................................................... 40
Problems? .......................................................................................................................................... 40
Miscellaneous configure options ............................................................................................................ 40
General Installation Considerations
Before installing first, you need to know what do you want to use PHP for. There are three main fields you can use PHP, as
described in the What can PHP do? section:
• Server-side scripting
• Command line scripting
• Client-side GUI applications
For the first and most common form, you need three things: PHP itself, a web server and a web browser. You probably
already have a web browser, and depending on your operating system setup, you may also have a web server (eg. Apache on
Linux or IIS on Windows). You may also rent webspace at a company. This way, you don't need to set up anything on your
own, only write your PHP scripts, upload it to the server you rent, and see the results in your browser.
While setting up the server and PHP on your own, you have two choices for the method of connecting PHP to the server.
For many servers PHP has a direct module interface (also called SAPI). These servers include Apache, Microsoft Internet
Information Server, Netscape and iPlanet servers. Many other servers have support for ISAPI, the Microsoft module inter-
face (OmniHTTPd for example). If PHP has no module support for your web server, you can always use it as a CGI pro-
cessor. This means you set up your server to use the command line executable of PHP (php.exe on Windows) to process
all PHP file requests on the server.
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