Installing Apache

The first step is to download the packages :
Apache : www.apache.org
PHP : www.php.net
MySQL : www.mysql.com

Installing apache is easy if you download the Microsoft Installer ( .msi ) package. Just double click on the icon to run the installation wizard. Click next until you see the Server Information window. You can enter localhost for both the Network Domain and Server Name. As for the administrator's email address you can enter anything you want.

I'm using Windows XP and installed Apache as Service so everytime I start Windows Apache is automatically started.



Click the Next button and choose Typical installation. Click Next one more time and choose where you want to install Apache ( I installed it in the default location C:\Program Files\Apache Group ). Click the Next button and then the Install button to complete the installation process.

To see if you Apache installation was successful open up you browser and type http://localhost in the address bar. You should see something like this :



By default Apache's document root is set to htdocs directory. The document root is where you must put all your PHP or HTML files so it will be process by Apache ( and can be seen through a web browser ). Of course you can change it to point to any directory you want. The configuration file for Apache is stored in C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\conf\httpd.conf ( assuming you installed Apache in C:\Program Files\Apache Group ) . It's just a plain text file so you can use Notepad to edit it.

For example, if you want to put all your PHP or HTML files in C:\www just find this line in the httpd.conf :

DocumentRoot "C:/Program Files/Apache Group/Apache2/htdocs"

and change it to :

DocumentRoot "C:/www"

After making changes to the configuration file you have to restart Apache ( Start > Programs > Apache HTTP Server 2.0.50 > Control Apache Server > Restart ) to see the effect.

Another configuration you may want to change is the directory index. This is the file that Apache will show when you request a directory. As an example if you type http://www.php-mysql-tutorial.com/ without specifying any file the index.php file will be automatically shown.

Suppose you want apache to use index.html, index.php or main.php as the directory index you can modify the DirectoryIndex value like this :

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php main.php

Now whenever you request a directory such as http://localhost/ Apache will try to find the index.html file or if it's not found Apache will use index.php. In case index.php is also not found then main.php will be used.

Modifying Apache Configuration

Apache doesn't know that you just install PHP. We need to tell Apache about PHP and where to find it. Open the Apache configuration file in C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\conf\httpd.conf and add the following three lines :

LoadModule php4_module php/sapi/php4apache2.dll
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

The first line tells Apache where to load the dll required to execute PHP and the second line means that every file that ends with .php should be processed as a PHP file. You can actually change it to anything you want like .html or even .asp! The third line is added so that you can view your php file source code in the browser window. You will see what this mean when you browse this tutorial and click the link to the example's source code like this one.

Now restart Apache for the changes to take effect ( Start > Programs > Apache HTTP Server 2.0.50 > Control Apache Server > Restart ) . To check if everything is okay create a new file, name it as test.php and put it in document root directory ( C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs ). The content of this file is shown below.

phpinfo();
?>

phpinfo() is the infamous PHP function which will spit out all kinds of stuff about PHP and your server configuration. Type http://localhost/test.php on your browser's address bar and if everything works well you should see something like this :