This article describes manual installation of PHP to work with an Apache web server.

Minimum Requirements

The mimimum requirements:

  1. A Microsoft Windows NT operating system. These instructions probably work with a Windows 9x OS as well, but we leave that up to you to test.

  2. A binary distribution of PHP available from www.php.net.

  3. Approximately 24MB of free disk space. Windows XP requires a minimum of 4GB of free disk space, so if you install onto Windows XP it's best to make sure a minimum of 10GB of disk space exists, no matter what you install.

  4. The more memory the better, but everything should run fine with 128MB or less, especially on older operating systems (like NT 4.0). Windows XP, however, seems to require a minimum of at least 512MB of RAM. And brand new systems come with gigabytes of RAM, so we anticipate no problems with any new system (relatively speaking, new turns ancient tomorrow in the computer industry).

  5. We know this runs fine on a 350MHz processor with 128 MB of RAM. But, again, Windows XP requires a minimum processing power of a gigahertz. At least 2 gigahertz probably works well enough for most folks.

  6. And last but not least, the content on this page deals with Apache, as opposed to IIS. IF you use IIS6, we feel your pains! IIS5 works great, but we noticed that Microsoft's websites go down quite often (Bill Gates runs IIS6.Nyet). So just make sure you install Apache.

Automated Install? Bahh!

Look ma! No installer! I did it myself! Your mom may not care, so we promote self-satisfaction.

Which Version Of PHP?

So how do we install PHP? And which version of PHP do we choose? We need to download a specific version and at least two versions exist. So the goal of the next two paragraphs involves helping out in deciding which version of PHP to install.

PHP Version 4

Version 4 definitely ends up as quicker software. The differences in speed are great. We noticed that webpage delivery with PHP 4 ends up going out in fractions of seconds. PHP 5, however, takes half a second to deliver the same page. So if you need speed and your processor tends to run on the slow side (less than 1.5 GHz), then we suggest PHP 4.

PHP Version 5

Version 5, offers a little more at the expense of speed. We currently only know that PHP 5 gets needed to work with SQLite. We still have PHP 4 installed, but Apache here now runs off PHP 5.2.0. And it doesn't take much to switch from one version to another and then keep both versions installed. That ends up as a big benefit. But note, that each installation requires about 24MB of disk space.

Updates to the information here shall arrive in the near future. We need to get our heads out of the sand first.

One nice benefit of PHP 5 involves the default settings in PHP.INI. We noticed that many pages we set up and configured ended up with undefined variables. The error log for PHP 5 filled up pretty quick with a lot of useful information about undefined variables, not that they actually broke anything, but it gave us something to do for a day.

Visit the links below while the content of this page gets developed.