Vista as my PHP Developer Workstation

  • Article

 

Prior to joining Microsoft, I always setup my Windows laptop as a PHP/Apache development workstation. Having created my own content management system in PHP (and who hasn’t!) – having a remote development copy is critical.

Over the last few weeks, I have installed the following onto my Vista Ultimate 64-bit laptop and home workstation:

  1. install IIS7 web server, with the CGI support (note: a version of IIS7 supplied with Vista SP1)

  2. Install Thread-safe PHP from https://windows.php.net/downloads.php

  3. Using the IIS Manager, and module remap .php extensions to the

  4. Install php_sqlsrv_ts.dll which is a part of the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP, modify the php.ini to launch/activate the extension [see comments below]

  5. The following change in the php.ini is also important in an IIS installation

    ; Set to 1 if running under IIS.  Default is zero.
    ; fastcgi.impersonate = 1;

  6. Restart the IIS

  7. Reading the https://forums.iis.net/ I also updated FastCGI (fixes REQUEST_URI)

Development Environments

Everyone has their favourite development environment. I do have Notepad++ installed, and often just resort to Notepad. As I am from Microsoft, I have access to Visual Studio. Searching out for a Visual Studio plugin: I am currently trialling vs.php (Visual Studio PHP; https://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php)