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 (e.g. 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 interface
(OmniHTTPd for example). If PHP has no module support for
your web server, you can always use it as a CGI processor.
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.
If you are also interested to use PHP for command line
scripting (e.g. write scripts autogenerating some images
for you offline, or processing text files depending on some
arguments you pass to them), you always need the command
line executable. For more information, read the section
about writing command line PHP applications. In this case,
you need no server and no browser.
With PHP you can also write client side GUI applications
using the PHP-GTK extension. This is a completely different
approach than writing web pages, as you do not output any
HTML, but manage windows and objects within them. For more
information about PHP-GTK, please visit the site dedicated
to this extension. PHP-GTK is not included in the official
PHP distribution.
From now on, this section deals with setting up PHP for
web servers on Unix and Windows with server module interfaces
and CGI executables.
Downloading PHP, the source code, and binary distributions
for Windows can be found at http://www.php.net/downloads.php.
We recommend you to choose a mirror nearest to you for downloading
the distributions.
