This tutorial will walk you through the steps of installing PHP and configuring Apache.

Download the latest PHP sources

Download the PHP tar.gz from PHP Homepage: http://www.php.net/downloads.php
Extract the source code

Extract the source code to a directory under /usr/local/src
cp php-4.3.0.tar.gz /usr/local/src

cd /usr/local/src

gunzip php-4.3.0.tar.gz

tar -xvf php-4.3.0.tar

rm -f php-4.3.0.tar

cd php-4.3.0

Set compiler options (optional)

If you want you can set some compiler options, this is typically done to create optimized code. One very common thing to do is to set CFLAGS=-O2 or CFLAGS=-O3 (that’s an Oh, not a Zero) that tells the compiler how much code optimization to do, setting it to a higher value does more optimization, but also takes longer to compile and may potentially cause unexpected things (not common). O2 is a fairly safe level to use. To do this type the following:

export CFLAGS=-O2

You can also tell the compiler what kind of CPU you have to perform more optimizations, I’m not going to get into that here, but if your interested check out the GCC manual. Configure php with autoconf

Now you need to set the configuration options, and check that all libraries needed to compile are present. This is done with a script called configure, to find out what options you can set type the following:

./configure –help

You will see quite a few options, here’s a page that defines the configure options. We will tell configure to enable mysql, and also tell it where to find apxs Apache’s tool for building modules. configure –with-mysql –with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs

Compile PHP

make

Install PHP

make install

Tell apache to load the module Edit httpd.conf /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf with your text editor. I prefer to use VI for its simplicity. Add the following to httpd.conf

Include conf.d/*.conf

This allows you to create a specific configuration file for each module that you install, for instance php.conf Now create a directory in your apache directory if its not there called conf.d mkdir /usr/local/apache2/conf.d

cd /usr/local/apache2/conf.d

Make a file called php.conf located at /usr/local/apache2/conf.d/php.conf with the contents:

# PHP Configuration for Apache

#
# Load the apache module
#
LoadModule php4_module modules/libphp4.so

#
# Cause the PHP interpreter handle files with a .php extension.
#
<Files *.php>
SetOutputFilter PHP
SetInputFilter PHP
LimitRequestBody 9524288
</Files>

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

#
# Add index.php to the list of files that will be served as directory
# indexes.
#
DirectoryIndex index.php

Note you could have just inserted the above in your httpd.conf file, and omit the conf.d step if you desire. I feel that the conf.d approch is a cleaner way to do it. That’s it, restart apache and you should have PHP working. (httpd restart)