Apache+PHP on Windows Server 2008
- by Álvaro G. Vicario
I've installed Apache/2.2 and PHP/5.3 lots of times under Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003. The official *.msi installers work fine and configure everything. Now I need to install them into a Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard 64-bit box and I'm facing nothing but problems:
There are no official 64 bit binaries for Apache and no binaries at all for PHP (official or third-party). It's alright, I'll do with good 32 bits, but it's kind of surprising.
Official documentation is vague, generic and completely unaware of UAC or any recent Windows security feature.
The PHP installer is unable to configure mod_php and the Apache installer is unable to configure... well, Apache.
After three hours I've finally reached the point where I'm installing everything in the root folder and assigning full control access to all users in all files and directories and all I've got is a PHP-less Apache server that's able to serve static pages. So I guess it's time to stop and think. My question is:
Has anyone installed an Apache+PHP production server under Windows Server 2008 in a serious, secure and reliable way and documented the whole process? Or should I just find a bundle like XAMPP and the like that requires no installation?
=== EDIT ===
I've installed Xampp Lite 1.7.3 and everything was working in 5 minutes. I'd still like to find some documentation about installing the original packages: XAMPP installs tons of stuff I don't need and offers no tool to enable and disable PHP extensions.