B.2 Installing with EasyPHP
The
best integrated Apache, PHP, and MySQL package for Microsoft Windows
is EasyPHP. It's frequently updated, carefully
maintained, and reasonably easy to install. However, unless
you're a French speaker, it does have the minor
disadvantage that some of the documentation and instructions are in
French.
Here are the steps to installing EasyPHP under Microsoft Windows. In
all steps, make sure you use upper or lowercase characters as shown:
Using a web browser, visit the http://www.easyphp.org/ web site. Click on
the language icon at the top of the page that best suits you (the
U.S. flag means English). Under the Main Menu heading on the left of the page, click on
Downloads and then click on the current version to start the
download; at the time of writing, this was EasyPHP1.7 which contains
Apache 1.3.27, PHP 4.3.3, and MySQL 4.0.15, and we assume this
version in these steps. Save the downloaded file in a temporary directory such as
C:\temp. When using EasyPHP 1.7, you'll find that some of the
features of MySQL 4.1 discussed in Chapter 15
and the features of PHP5 discussed in Chapter 14
can't be used. However, the rest of the material
(including the online winestore) works without modification. Run the downloaded file using the Run option in the Start menu. If
you downloaded EasyPHP 1.7, the file that's
downloaded is easyphp1-7_setup.exe. and you can
run it by typing: c:\temp\easyphp1-7_setup.exe
Click OK. This will begin the EasyPHP installation process. Now, click Next to start, read the agreements and then check the
option that accepts the agreement and click Next. Then, if your
French is good, read the advice and click Next again; the advice
suggests that the EasyPHP environment works well for development but
isn't for application deployment. Our
advice—for security and performance reasons—is to use a
Unix environment such as Linux for application deployment. The installer asks where you want to install the software, and
defaults to c:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-7\. Unless
you want to change it, click Next and answer Yes to creating the new
directory. We assume this directory in the rest of this appendix. Now, choose where you want the EasyPHP menu option to be in your
Start Menu launcher. Unless you don't want it in the
Programs menu, just accept the default by clicking Next. We assume
it's in the Programs menu in the following steps. You've now made all the choices that are needed.
Click Install and wait as the install process completes. When
it's finished, click Finish. You can now run your Apache and MySQL servers. Click on the Start
menu, Programs, Easy PHP 1.7, and on the Easy PHP program. A window
should appear; if it doesn't, Apache is already
running, and you should see a large E in your taskbar that you can
double-click to make the window appear. In the EasyPHP window, choose the language from the drop down that
suits you. Then, assuming you've chosen English,
select the options Start on Windows Startup and
Start Apache and MySQL as Services. Then click
on Apply, and minimize the window. You should now see a large E with
a blinking red dot in your taskbar that signifies EasyPHP is running. To test your Apache and PHP, create the file
phpinfo.php in the directory
C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-7\www\ and type in the
following contents: <?php phpinfo( ); ?>
If you don't have a special-purpose text editor, use
Notepad or WordPad, but make sure the file is saved with the
extension .php and not
.php.txt. Now, load the URL http://127.0.0.1/phpinfo.php with a web
browser on the same machine as your EasyPHP installation. You should
see a screen containing information about your Apache and PHP
installation. Make a note that your Apache Document Root is C:\Program
Files\EasyPHP1-7\www\. Let's configure your MySQL. To begin, test that you
can access the MySQL server using the command interpreter. To do
this, select the Run option in the Start Menu and enter: "C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-7\mysql\bin\mysql.exe" -uroot
Click OK, and a window containing the command interpreter should
appear. This means your MySQL server is running. Quit the MySQL
command interpreter with the command: mysql> quit
The window should close automatically. Choose and set a password for root user access
to the MySQL DBMS. To set a password of
secret, choose the Run option in the Start
Menu and enter: "C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-7\mysql\bin\mysqladmin.exe" -uroot
password secret
Click OK and a window will rapidly open and close, and you
shouldn't hear a beep if you've
typed the command correctly. Record the password for later use. Start the MySQL command line interpreter using the password defined
in the previous step by clicking on Run in the Start Menu and
entering: "C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-7\mysql\bin\mysql.exe" -uroot -psecret
Click OK. Record this step for later use—you'll need it
whenever you want to access the command interpreter as the root user. Let's create a new user for the MySQL installation
that can carry out all actions required for a typical application
(such as accessing our winestore database
examples in the book), but has no access to other databases and
can't change database access privileges. The new
user also can't access the DBMS from a remote
server. To add the user, choose a username to replace
username and a password to replace
password in the following command: GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, LOCK TABLES ON winestore.* TO
username@127.0.0.1 IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
MySQL responds with: Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Record the username and password. Quit the MySQL command interpreter
with the command: mysql> quit
The window should close automatically. Start the MySQL command line interpreter using the
username and
password you defined in the previous step
by clicking on Run in the Start Menu and entering: "C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-7\mysql\bin\mysql.exe" -uusername -ppassword
Record this step for later use—you'll need it
whenever you want to access the command interpreter using your user
account username. Quit the MySQL
interpreter again with: mysql> quit
Your Apache, PHP, and MySQL setup is now functioning. To finish
installation, you now need to set up PEAR and your mail services.
Let's start with PEAR, and for this
you'll need an Internet connection. Edit the file C:\Program
Files\EasyPHP1-7\php\go-pear.bat. To do this, you can use
Notepad or WordPad. Change: set PHP_BIN=cli/php.exe
to set PHP_BIN=php.exe
Save the file and quit the editor. Click on Run in the Start Menu and enter: "C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-7\php\go-pear.bat"
Click OK. Press Enter to proceed, and then either type in your web
proxy server details or press Enter (for most installations, you can
just press Enter). You'll now be presented with a list of 7 options,
and option 1 should show c:\Program
Files\EasyPHP1-7\php\PEAR. If it doesn't
press 1, Enter, and type in the
path: c:\progra~1\easyph~1\php\PEAR
Press Enter and the path should update next to option 1. Option 7 may not show the path to your php.exe
correctly. If it's blank or is not set to
C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-7\php\ then
type 7 and press Enter, and then
type: C:\progra~1\easyph~1\php\
The trailing backslash is necessary. When you press Enter, you should
see that option 7 has updated to the correct path. Press Enter to continue the installation. Check that
you're still connected to the Internet, and then
press Enter to choose to install the bundled packages. This will
start the install process and you'll see packages
being installed. At the conclusion of the install, there may be a warning about your
php.ini not containing the correct path to the
PEAR include files. Ignore this by pressing Enter, and
we'll fix it manually in the next step. Using an editor such as Notepad or WordPad, edit the file: C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-7\apache\php.ini
Find the line beginning: include_path =
and change it so the complete line is: include_path = ".;c:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-7\php\pear\pear"
While we're editing the php.ini
file, we'll update the mail sending settings. Find
the line beginning: SMTP =
and adjust this to be the name of your outgoing SMTP mail server.
Generally, this is your ISP's domain name prefixed
by mail. For example, for users
of bigpond.com,
it's: SMTP = mail.bigpond.com
Now find the line beginning: sendmail_from =
and update it to your email address
me@myaddress.com: sendmail_from = me@myaddress.com
Now, save the file and exit the editor. The mail configuration allows
both PHP's internal mail( )
function and the PEAR Mail package to work. To re-read the php.ini file, you need to restart
your Apache web server. To do this, double-click on the E in the
taskbar, press the button labeled
"Apache," click on Restart, and
then press Close to minimize the window. You've now completed the installation process. Make
a note that your PHP configuration php.ini file
is located in C:\Program
Files\EasyPHP1-7\apache. Your MySQL configuration my.ini file (this is
known as my.cnf in Unix) is in stored in
C:\winnt or C:\windows
depending on your Windows version. To check where it is, click on the
Start menu, then on Search, and then on For Files or Folders. Type
my.ini and press the Enter key. The folder
that contains the file will be shown after the search is complete.
Make a note of the folder. If need to edit these files, you can do so using Notepad, WordPad, or
another editor, or you can edit them by double-clicking on the large
E in the taskbar, and then single-clicking the E in the top-left of
the window, selecting the Configuration option, and selecting the
file you want to edit. You can also use the EasyPHP window to start
and stop Apache and MySQL; clicking on the MySQL and Apache buttons
shows all of the options. This completes the Microsoft Windows install. If you want to install
the book sample code, continue on to the next
section.
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