2009/08/08

Installing PHP in IIS 6 (windows 2003)

Some time ago I tried to install PHP in a test machine with Windows 2003 and IIS, so I could do some tests more easily. At that time I failed to get it working. The theory is simple, I found several tutorials explaining how to do it, but I wasn't able to get nothing but a "404 page not found" whenever I requested a .php page in that server.

Today I decided to try again. Quite a lot of things have changed in this time.

PHP has setup a separate site to handle installing PHP in Windows. Unfortunately the site is not as friendly as it seems that they are planning, but at least it's clear that they acknowledge the fact that there's a need for help installing PHP in windows. Besides the downloads it seems that there's little more in that site at the moment, but that download page is a little daunting:

Reading the sidebar you can see that you need to get the VC9 versions to install it in IIS, and the VC6 are meant to be used with the Apache server. But:
Thread safe or Not Thread safe?
Zip, Installer or Debug Pack?

Wouldn't it be better to move that Debug pack to somewhere else?

I'll skip some steps, and I would like you to introduce you this page that explains how to configure FastCGI and PHP in IIS.

You could have done the two first steps like I did, I downloaded the installer for PHP-non threaded-vc9 and when I tried to run it and configure for "IIS FastCGI" it warned to first download and install the FastCGI extension.

But you won't get the explanation about how to configure the FastCGI extension, so keep reading that page. I tried to do the automatic configuration using the script, but I got an error, so I don't know what's wrong. I tried to verify then all the steps according to he manual configuration and it seemed to be OK. But I got again a "404 page not found" trying to load any php page.

The next step was removing all of it and try with this automated installer for PHP in IIS . Yes, now Microsoft is hosting a whole site devoted to support for PHP in IIS, so this looks like a first stop when you try to get it working or troubleshoot something related to IIS and PHP. Wow.

After installing that "Web plataform installer" it took care of the rest by itself, each product was downloaded and installed, and I guess that it might have done that "configure FastCGI" in the bundle.

But again it didn't work!!!

The difference for me was that this time I knew that I was using the correct files, it's a tested installer, so I can't blame it on me due to having picked the wrong file in the PHP downloads (in this case I've noticed that they are using PHP 5.2.10 instead of the latest one PHP 5.3 that I picked).

So I tried to look more carefuly at it and then I noticed that under the "Default web site" properties it doesn't have assigned the .php script mapping. It was done correctly at the "Web sites" (parent folder), but not on the site itself. For some reason that setting didn't propagate to the child nodes, so I "edited" it and pressed OK, and it asked whether to update the value in the child sites. I said YES, and Now PHP Works!!!

As a summary:

The problem that I had was that the setting was correct for the "Web sites" node, but the real website node didn't get that setting applied, I guess that I might have messed previously (as I said this is a test machine) and those automatic scripts didn't try to update it.

 

 

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