I downloaded phpbb and MySQL because i’m trying to do some experimenting with both. The instructions for the php seemed to make sense to me: just copy the files and folder somewhere. There isn’t any setup.exe or anything like that. So i put everything into the Inetpub folder and changed the IIS settings to point to that folder.
The problem i’m having is making the php actually run. Everytime i browse to a php file, e.g. index.php, it comes up as a download instead of displaying the page. If i open the page in Dreamweaver i can see the page, but IE won’t run the code and i’m at wit’s end with this, any ideas how to make php run? Does XP even know how to interpret php code? I’m lost.
You have to “tell” IIS to use the php plugin or executable (both forms exist) for any files that end with .php
As to how this is done, don’t ask me – I could probably tell you more than you’d ever want to know about setting php up on Apache, though… We’ll both have to wait for someone who’s used IIS to come along and explain the nuts and bolts of this.
I’ve done this, but a long time ago, so I’m sketchy on the details.
Go into the IIS manager, right click on your website in the right pane, and select properties. Go to the ‘home directory’ tab and click on the configuration button.
Under the ‘app mapping’ tab of the application configuration dialog box, click the add button. For ‘executable’ browse to the location of php.exe, for extension type .php , leave the ‘all verbs’ radio button on.
The ‘script engine’ check box has to do with IIS security and how it deals with the new program type, in this case PHP. If you want IIS to be generally relaxed about running PHP scripts, click on the check box. If you want it to be paranoid and treat them like CGI programs, leave it unchecked. Now ‘ok’ your way out of the dialog boxes.
I hope this helps.
chrisk, I followed everything until the php.exe part. phpbb didn’t come with any executables or dll’s. The only extensions were php, htm, and few others.
Actually MySQL itself is very easy to setup and run. You must be talking about getting MySQL to run through PHP. I had the same trouble with PHP 5 on Windows.
It’s been a few months since then, but if I recall correctly, they removed the built-in MySQL functionality from PHP 5. (Don’t ask me why…it didn’t seem like a good enough reason to me at the time)
After tinkering with PHP 5 / MySQL for 5 minutes or so, I decided the easiest solution was to install PHP 4 (which is still supported–they release the latest version of PHP 4 and PHP 5 generally at the same time). PHP 4 works like a champ with MySQL out of the box.