Page 1 of 1

Getting PHP to work on a desktop

Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 4:53 pm
by L4E_WakaMol-King
Sorry... wasn't sure where to put this. As you can probably tell, I'm new.

Is there a way to get PHP to work on my desktop for testing purposes? For example, I can write html in Textpad or some other editor and launch it in a browser to see what it looks like... but I can't do that with PHP documents. Is there a simple way to make that possible? Right now I have to upload everything I do in PHP to my server and test it there, and that gets kind of tiresome.

Thanks in advance if anyone can help.

Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 5:03 pm
by feyd

Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 5:04 pm
by jamiel
Download php from http://www.php.net , then read install.txt and follow the instructions for your webserver. I presume Apache.

Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 6:08 pm
by RobertGonzalez
You need a server first. Install either IIS (if you have the ability and are in Windows) or httpd (The apache web server) and get that set up first. Then download and install PHP. If all goes well, it will detect your server and modify the configuration of the server so that the server can serve up PHP without any modifications on your part. If that is the case, you are golden and should be able to write your first PHP page, doing this...

Code: Select all

<?php
phpinfo();
?>
Save that into your local servers web root as my-php-info.php and hit it at http://localhost/my-php-info.php. If you did it right, you should see a lot of information about your PHP installation. If you did it wrong, you will see the code that is above instead of what the code does.

Easy PHP

Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 6:17 pm
by exedesign
I use Easy PHP, Its a nice little application that has PHP, Apache, and mysql Built-in. Very easy to install.
Its also FREE
get it here. http://easyphp.org/

Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 12:56 am
by matthijs
An excellent and easy to use package is XAMPP. If you don't want to install everything manually this package is an alternative. Download, click install, ready. Switch between php4 and 5. For the mac, I'm using MAMP.

Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 1:08 am
by daedalus__
If you are new to all of this and/or aren't to handy with your computer, I would recommend using package.

I wanted to add that Windows 98, ME, and 2000 can use PWS (Personal Web Server) from Microsoft while Windows XP Professional can use a dumbed down IIS 5.5 (not sure of the version). XP Home doesn't support either.

Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 1:47 am
by L4E_WakaMol-King
I found WAMP, and that seems to be working fine. Thank very much for the help!