Servers-CGI/Commandline
The default is to build PHP as a CGI
program. This creates a commandline interpreter, which can
be used for CGI processing, or for non-web-related PHP scripting.
If you are running a web server PHP has module support for,
you should generally go for that solution for performance
reasons. However, the CGI version enables Apache users to
run different PHP-enabled pages under different user-ids.
Please make sure you read through the Security chapter if
you are going to run PHP as a CGI.
As of PHP 4.3.0, some important additions have happened
to PHP. A new SAPI named CLI also exists and it has the
same name as the CGI binary. What is installed at {PREFIX}/bin/php
depends on your configure line and this is described in
detail in the manual section named Using PHP from the command
line. For further details please read that section of the
manual.
Testing
If you have built PHP as a CGI program, you may test your
build by typing make test. It is always a good idea to test
your build. This way you may catch a problem with PHP on
your platform early instead of having to struggle with it
later.
Benchmarking
If you have built PHP 3 as a CGI program, you may benchmark
your build by typing make bench. Note that if safe mode
is on by default, the benchmark may not be able to finish
if it takes longer then the 30 seconds allowed. This is
because the set_time_limit() can not be used in safe mode.
Use the max_execution_time configuration setting to control
this time for your own scripts. make bench ignores the configuration
file.
Note: make bench is only available for PHP 3.
Using Variables
Some server supplied environment variables are not defined
in the current CGI/1.1 specification. Only the following
variables are defined there; everything else should be treated
as 'vendor extensions': AUTH_TYPE, CONTENT_LENGTH, CONTENT_TYPE,
GATEWAY_INTERFACE, PATH_INFO, PATH_TRANSLATED, QUERY_STRING,
REMOTE_ADDR, REMOTE_HOST, REMOTE_IDENT, REMOTE_USER, REQUEST_METHOD,
SCRIPT_NAME, SERVER_NAME, SERVER_PORT, SERVER_PROTOCOL and
SERVER_SOFTWARE
