Starting Dev with PHP on Windows

Question

I have written web apps with JSP in the past. Now, I'm getting started with PHP. I have a question and a friend of mine who is a .NET developer pointed me to this site.

I downloaded and installed PHP from here . Now, I'm trying to get the Windows Azure for PHP SDKs setup. The reason for this is that my app needs to be hosted in Azure. After I downloaded the SDK, I looked in the install.txt file. The file states that I need to add the library directory to my PHP include_path. My problem is, I do not see an environment variable named "include_path" in my settings. Should one have been created? Is the PHP include_path even an environment variable? Can someone help me out please?

Thank you!

Answer 1

include_path is a configuration setting usually set in the php.ini file.

Run a PHP script containing

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

to find out which php.ini is actually being used - it can be confusing sometimes.

The INI file will contain the setting, which you can then change.

You will probably need to restart the web server after changes.

I don't know how PHP and Azure work together. If the INI method doesn't apply here, here is the PHP manual section on ways to change PHP config settings other than php.ini.

Answer 2

I would go with a dedicated development system like XAMPP . Although it should be noted that XAMPP should NEVER be used on a production system. It is very insecure and they are very very very slow at patching known vulnerabilities in their stack.

Answer 3

Question: If you're planning on building an Azure based system, why are you choosing to build it in PHP rather than C# on ASP.NET?

.NET is Microsoft's primary platform for web infrastructure development: Azure support will come quicker and will be FAR more thorough for .NET vs. any other platform.

Remember: "Just because you can doesn't mean you should" ;)

I strongly encourage you to build your Azure site in .NET, not PHP.

Answer 4

As you get going with PHP and Azure, you might find some of these articles to be helpful resources: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/tags/azure/ .

-Brian