Building a Database-Driven Web Site Using PHP and MySQL

by Kevin Yank of SitePoint.com

Installing under Linux

This section covers the exact procedure for installing PHP and MySQL under RedHat Linux 5 or later. If you're using a different flavor of Linux, or another Unix-based operating system, the steps involved will be very similar, if not identical.

As a user of RedHat Linux, you may be tempted to download and install the RPM distributions of PHP and MySQL. RPM's are nice, pre-packaged versions of software that are really easy to install. Unfortunately, they also limit the options you have in choosing how the software is configured. For this reason, I consider the RPM versions of PHP and MySQL to be more trouble than they are worth.

Since a few of the default RedHat Linux install configurations will automatically install PHP for you, your first step should be to remove any old versions of PHP and MySQL from your system. You'll need to be logged in as the root user to issue the commands to do this. Note that in the following commands, "%" represents the shell prompt, and is not something that needs to be typed.

% rpm -e mysql
% rpm -e php

If either or both of these commands tell you that the program in question is not installed, don't worry about it. If the second command runs successfully (i.e. no message is displayed), then you did indeed have an older version of PHP installed, and you'll need to do one more thing to get rid of it entirely. Open your Apache configuration file (usually /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf) in your favorite text editor and look for the two lines shown here. They usually appear in separate sections of the file, so don't worry if they're not together.

LoadModule php3_module modules/libphp3.so
AddModule mod_php3.c

These lines are responsible for telling Apache to load PHP as a plug-in module. Since you just uninstalled that module, you'll need to get rid of these lines to make sure Apache keeps working properly. You can comment out these lines by adding a hash (#) at the beginning of both lines.

To make sure Apache is still in working order, you should now restart it without the PHP plug-in:

% /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd stop
% /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd start

With everything neat and tidy, you're ready to download and install MySQL and PHP.

Article Index Introduction and Contents Part 1: Installation Part 2: Getting Started with MySQL Part 3: Getting Started with PHP Part 4: Publishing MySQL Data on the Web   Challenge Solution Buy this book in print format now

Installing MySQL under Linux

SitePoint.com is a fast growing Web Developer Community. Kevin Yank is the Editor of the SitePoint TechTimes, a fresh, technically oriented newsletter for the serious Webmaster.