For beginners looking to develop on their own machine, XAMPP is an option. It contains the requirements for a development server mentioned in this tutorial (Apache, PHP and MariaDB - which is an alternative to MySQL). Its advantage over LAMPP and MAMPP are that it has versions for multiple operating systems including Linux.
What do I need?
In this tutorial we assume that your server has activated support for PHP and that all files ending in .php are handled by PHP. On most servers, this is the default extension for PHP files, but ask your server administrator to be sure. If your server supports PHP, then you do not need to do anything. Just create your .php files, put them in your web directory and the server will automatically parse them for you. There is no need to compile anything nor do you need to install any extra tools. Think of these PHP-enabled files as simple HTML files with a whole new family of magical tags that let you do all sorts of things.
Let us say you want to save precious bandwidth and develop locally. In this case, you will want to install a web server, such as » Apache, and of course » PHP. You will most likely want to install a database as well, such as » MySQL.
You can either install these individually or choose a simpler way. Our manual has installation instructions for PHP (assuming you already have some web server set up). If you have problems with installing PHP yourself, we would suggest you ask your questions on our » installation mailing list. If you choose to go on the simpler route, then » locate a pre-configured package for your operating system, which automatically installs all of these with just a few mouse clicks. It is easy to setup a web server with PHP support on any operating system, including MacOSX, Linux and Windows. On Linux, you may find » rpmfind and » PBone helpful for locating RPMs. You may also want to visit » apt-get to find packages for Debian.
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User Contributed Notes 7 notes
Ben Latham ¶
1 year ago
theOne ¶
4 months ago
WAMP is a great start for most beginners on a Windows platform like stated above. A suggestion would be to using PHP with Graph Databases as well. Maybe taking a look at the Neo4j PHP-client.
TomIdze ¶
2 months ago
Very simple und powerfull PHP-server is QuickPHP from http://www.zachsaw.com/?pg=quickphp_php_tester_debugger
drj at pobox dot com ¶
10 months ago
Running a standalone server with
php -S 0:8765
is quite simple and has much to commend it. You can then visit the URL localhost:8765/whatever.php
Madison Bi ¶
1 year ago
WAMP is the most convenience program for beginner,it is contain Apache,Mysql,PHP, that is means your operation system is Windows.
aminulislam dot mme at gmail dot com ¶
8 months ago
XAMPP is very useful as php server. This package helps to run any php file in your Browser. just write the directory and go to your php site
