Installation on Windows systems
PHP Manual

Manual Installation Steps

This section contains instructions for manually installing and configuring PHP on Microsoft Windows. For the instructions on how to use PHP installer to setup and configure PHP and a web server on Windows refer to Windows Installer (PHP 5.2 and later).

Selecting and downloading the PHP distribution package

Download the PHP zip binary distribution from » PHP for Windows: Binaries and Sources. There are several different versions of the zip package - chose the version that is suitable for the web server being used:

Note:

VC9 Versions are compiled with the Visual Studio 2008 compiler and have improvements in performance and stability. The VC9 versions require you to have the » Microsoft 2008 C++ Runtime (x86) or the » Microsoft 2008 C++ Runtime (x64) installed.

The PHP package structure and content

Unpack the content of the zip archive into a directory of your choice, for example C:\PHP\. The directory and file structure extracted from the zip will look as below:

Example #1 PHP 5 package structure


c:\php
   |
   +--dev
   |  |
   |  |-php5ts.lib                 -- php5.lib in non thread safe version
   |
   +--ext                          -- extension DLLs for PHP
   |  |
   |  |-php_bz2.dll
   |  |
   |  |-php_cpdf.dll
   |  |
   |  |-...
   |
   +--extras                       -- empty 
   |
   +--pear                         -- initial copy of PEAR
   |
   |
   |-go-pear.bat                   -- PEAR setup script
   |
   |-...
   |
   |-php-cgi.exe                   -- CGI executable
   |
   |-php-win.exe                   -- executes scripts without an opened command prompt
   |
   |-php.exe                       -- Command line PHP executable (CLI)
   |
   |-...
   |
   |-php.ini-development           -- default php.ini settings
   |
   |-php.ini-production            -- recommended php.ini settings
   |
   |-php5apache2_2.dll             -- does not exist in non thread safe version
   |
   |-php5apache2_2_filter.dll      -- does not exist in non thread safe version
   |
   |-...
   |
   |-php5ts.dll                    -- core PHP DLL ( php5.dll in non thread safe version)
   | 
   |-...

Below is the list of the modules and executables included in the PHP zip distribution:

Changing the php.ini file

After the php package content has been extracted, copy the php.ini-production into php.ini in the same folder. If necessary, it is also possible to place the php.ini into any other location of your choice but that will require additional configuration steps as described in PHP Configuration.

The php.ini file tells PHP how to configure itself, and how to work with the environment that it runs in. Here are a number of settings for the php.ini file that help PHP work better with Windows. Some of these are optional. There are many other directives that may be relevant to your environment - refer to the list of php.ini directives for more information.

Required directives:

Optional directives

PHP is now setup on your system. The next step is to choose a web server, and enable it to run PHP. Choose a web server from the table of contents.

In addition to running PHP via a web server, PHP can run from the command line just like a .BAT script. See Command Line PHP on Microsoft Windows for further details.


Installation on Windows systems
PHP Manual