PHP installation on Windows

Installation on Windows systems
This section applies to Windows 98/Me and Windows NT/2000/XP. PHP will not work on 16 bit platforms such as Windows 3.1 and sometimes we refer to the supported Windows platforms as Win32. Windows 95 is no longer supported as of PHP 4.3.0.

There are two main ways to install PHP for Windows: either manually or by using the InstallShield installer.

If you have Microsoft Visual Studio, you can also build PHP from the original source code.

Once you have PHP installed on your Windows system, you may also want to load various extensions for added functionality.

Windows InstallShield
The Windows PHP installer is available from the downloads page at http://www.php.net/downloads.php. This installs the CGI version of PHP and, for IIS, PWS, and Xitami, configures the web server as well.

Note: While the InstallShield installer is an easy way to make PHP work, it is restricted in many aspects, as automatic setup of extensions for example is not supported. The whole set of supported extensions is only available by downloading the zip binary distribution.

Install your selected HTTP server on your system and make sure that it works.

Run the executable installer and follow the instructions provided by the installation wizard. Two types of installation are supported - standard, which provides sensible defaults for all the settings it can, and advanced, which asks questions as it goes along.

The installation wizard gathers enough information to set up the php.ini file and configure the web server to use PHP. For IIS and also PWS on NT Workstation, a list of all the nodes on the server with script map settings is displayed, and you can choose those nodes to which you wish to add the PHP script mappings.

Once the installation has completed the installer will inform you if you need to restart your system, restart the server, or just start using PHP.