Things to consider before PHP installation

Before installing, you need to know what you want to do with PHP first. PHP is primarily used in three areas, and is described in the section "What PHP can Do":

• Web sites and Web applications (server-side scripting)
• Command-line scripting
• Desktop (GUI) applications

In general, three things are needed: PHP itself, a Web server, and a Web browser. You may already have a Web browser, and depending on the configuration of your operating system, it is likely that you already have a Web server (for example, IIS under Apache;windows under Linux and MacOS). Maybe you rented a web space in a company so that you don't have to set anything up, just write PHP scripts, upload them to the rented space, and view the results in the browser.

If you need to configure your server and PHP yourself, there are two ways to connect 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. Many other servers support ISAPI, the Microsoft Module interface (OMNIHTTPD is an example). If PHP cannot support a Web server as a module, it can always be used as a CGI or FastCGI processor. This means you can use PHP's CGI executable to process PHP file requests on all servers.

If you are interested in PHP command-line scripting (for example, when offline, depending on the parameters passed to the script, automatically generate some pictures, or work with some text files), then you will need a command line executable program. For more information, refer to PHP's command-line mode. If this is the case, the server and browser are not required.

You can also use PHP's PHP-GTK extension to write desktop GUI applications. This is completely different from writing a Web page because you do not need to output any HTML, but to manage the objects in Windows and Windows. For more information about PHP-GTK, please? Visit a website that is specifically built for this extension. PHP-GTK is not included in the official PHP release.

Now, this section begins by explaining how to configure the Server module interface and the CGI executable in the Unix and Windows Web servers. Information about command-line executable installation is also learned in the following sections.

PHP source and binary packages can be in the? Http://www.php.net/downloads.php found. Recommended to choose a recent one? Mirror image server download.

Things to consider before PHP installation