Adding PHP to Apache on Linux
Going Further/In Conclusion
Ken Coar
Thursday, December 23, 1999 07:46:09 AM
With PHP installed and working, what do you do then? Well, that's
really up to you—but for a couple of examples of what's possible,
check out the PHP site itself and the
ApacheCon 2000 site. The PHP site is
totally driven by the software; as you browse through the online documentation,
you can see that not only is it 'live,' meaning that you can comment on it or
make suggestions for improvements, but you can also see what other
people have suggested. The ApacheCon 2000 site uses PHP to display the very
latest information on sessions, speakers, sponsors, and other aspects of the
conference, building each page when it's requested from the data,
stored in a MySQL database.
The documentation link at the PHP site is invaluable. While it doesn't give
a lot of guidance on how to accomplish things, it's very complete when it comes
to descriptions of the PHP functions. For more, check USENET or the PHP mailing
lists.
One final trick, which is illustrated at the PHP site, is to add the 'show
me the source' feature to your server. Add a line like this to your
/usr/local/web/apache/conf/httpd.conf file:
AddType application/x-httpd-php3-source .phps
and then soft-linka .php3 files to the same name
with a .phps extension, as with
% ln -s some-php-file.php3 some-php-file.phps
Requesting the .phps file in a Web browser will
display the source of a PHP (or PHP-enabled HTML) file,
nicely color-coded.
In Conclusion
If running the Apache Web server and wanting to make your Web pages
more interactive, responsive, personalised or otherwise to "spice them up," PHP
is an easy and excellent way to do it. The software is under constant intense
scrutiny by dozens of developers, so problems are fixed quite quickly.
Got a Topic You Want Covered?
If you have a particular Apache-related topic that you'd like covered in a
future article in this column, please let me know at <coar@Apache.Org>. I do read and
answer my email, usually within a few hours (although a few days may pass if
I'm travelling or my mail volume is way up). If I don't respond within what
seems to be a reasonable amount of time, ping me again!
Next: Appendix A: Building Apache at Lightspeed »
