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PHP4 Installation Overview

Page 7 — Getting Up and Running (Windows)

Usually Windows users use the CGI version of PHP, and for a good reason: It's stable, and you can easily plug it in to the most popular Windows-based Web servers: Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS), and Xitami. One of the drawbacks of the CGI version of PHP is its inability to use PHP-based authentication. Besides the overall performance hit, this would be the other glaring drawback. There's nothing, however, stopping you from using your normal Web server-based authentication; they're mutually exclusive.

As for the ISAPI version of PHP, it's coming along. The PHP Development Team may not consider it ready for prime time just yet, but it is getting closer with each release, and it continues to be part of the official distribution. Now about that "official distribution" -- the PHP Development Team distributes a set of pre-compiled files that they feel are the core, stable, working elements of PHP, but these files may not suit your needs. You have two other options: Grab the Windows source code and compile it yourself, picking and choosing the support you want and the version you'd like to build, or simply depend on the kindness of strangers, who do their own pre-fab compilations and distribute them for your using pleasure.

The latter is a popular choice, and there is one group of PHP developers in particular who have done a good job of producing a comprehensive set of pre-compiled files, which you can find at NAPP: Not Another PHP Portal. From this site you can download a ZIP file full of extensions: tons of database connectivity extensions, image creation, CyberCash, FTP functions, and so on. Their distribution also includes the ISAPI, NSAPI, AOLServer, and Apache modules for Windows.

In this tutorial, you'll learn the basic CGI installation of PHP on Windows, with Apache. It's so simple to install, however, that I'm positive you'll soon be downloading additional extensions or even attempting a module installation. When that time comes and you're ready to venture out on your own, bookmark the search page for the php-windows mailing list as a resource for those trying times.

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