Installation on Windows systems
This section applies to Windows 98/Me
and Windows NT/2000/XP. PHP will not work on 16 bit platforms
such as Windows 3.1 and sometimes we refer to the supported
Windows platforms as Win32. Windows 95 is no longer supported
as of PHP 4.3.0.
There are two main ways to install PHP for Windows: either
manually or by using the InstallShield installer.
If you have Microsoft Visual Studio, you can also build
PHP from the original source code.
Once you have PHP installed on your Windows system, you
may also want to load various extensions for added functionality.
Windows InstallShield
The Windows PHP installer is available from the downloads
page at http://www.php.net/downloads.php. This installs
the CGI version of PHP and, for IIS, PWS, and Xitami, configures
the web server as well.
Note: While the InstallShield installer is an easy way
to make PHP work, it is restricted in many aspects, as automatic
setup of extensions for example is not supported. The whole
set of supported extensions is only available by downloading
the zip binary distribution.
Install your selected HTTP server on your system
and make sure that it works.
Run the executable installer and follow the instructions
provided by the installation wizard. Two types of installation
are supported - standard, which provides sensible defaults
for all the settings it can, and advanced, which asks questions
as it goes along.
The installation wizard gathers enough information to set
up the php.ini file and configure the web server to use
PHP. For IIS and also PWS on NT Workstation, a list of all
the nodes on the server with script map settings is displayed,
and you can choose those nodes to which you wish to add
the PHP script mappings.
Once the installation has completed the installer will
inform you if you need to restart your system, restart the
server, or just start using PHP.
