John Mertic

The new PHP 5.2.6 release will feature automatic configuration of the NetServe Web Server thanks to help from James at Net-X Solutions. There also will be some bug fixes in the area of FastCGI configuration, Vista support, and extension configuration.

I’ve also changed jobs recently, starting at SugarCRM back in December as a Software Engineer. Big thanks to Travis Swicegood for helping me find this amazing opportunity.

Thanks to a missed CVS commit, Bug # 43230 came up b0rking the installer last week. I rebuilt it and updated it at http://www.php.net/downloads.php ( with big thanks to Derick Rethans for the karma and help finding my way to get it updated ).

Sorry for all the confusion and problems this has caused.

After reading Joe Stanger’s post on the Go Live release of the Microsoft FastCGI Extension, I’ve added support in the installer for the now in CVS. This should help those on deploying via IIS as it is much better option than CGI ( or ISAPI *shudder* ), and the installer will provide automatic configuration of IIS for you.

It’s almost been a year now since the first testing release the of the installer came out ( http://news.php.net/php.internals/24929 ). I would like to thank everyone who has used and provided feedback on it; as my first real contribution to PHP and Open Source in general, it has been a very rewarding experience.

I am always looking for any suggestions for improvements to the installer. I’m also curious how people are using it; is it just for personal development, or is there anyone using it to deploy to a group of desktops or servers?

I’ll be wandering around at OSCON in two weeks, mostly in the PHP tracks. If you are using the installer, I’d like to meet you and hear any feedback you may have.

No major user-visible changes were made for this release, but all the problems people had with configuring IIS and Apache should have gone away with this release. I’ve made some changes to the builder so that it supports an installer for PHP 6, which should appear on snaps.php.net soon.

Speaking of snaps.php.net , be sure to check out the re-design of the site. It’s much cleaner, uses the PHP styles, and lists the PHP Windows Installers snapshot builds. Thanks to Edin for plugging in the backend code and everyone on internals with comments and suggestions.

To correct a bunch of bugs found with configuring Apache and IIS, I’ve made an “unofficial” re-release of the installer for 5.2.2.

http://files.edin.dk/php/installer/php-5.2.2-2-win32-installer.msi

Thanks to everyone who reported the problems; hopefully this should address them.

Just wanted to say thanks to Edin for getting the installer building alongside the normal snapshot builds.

The big thing that got this done was going thru the Feature list and removing those Features without Components that where in the Extensions.wxs file. However, the XPath queries were spotty at best. The clean way of doing this by iterating thru all of the ComponentRefs in ExtensionFeatures.wxs and doing an XPath query on each one would often skip many results, so I had to do the less-than-elegant way and iterate thru the results of getElementsByTagName(”Component”) for each ComponentRef. At least it works now…

I’m also working on the making the installer work for PHP 6; it’s mostly a bunch of %s/php5/php6/g thru the files, so it should be out there relatively quickly.

I’ve reworked the code to configure IIS and Apache to use CustomActions that are included directly in the MSI itself instead of running the installed scripts apacheconfig.php and IISConfig.exe; the big advantage is that I can access installer features and properties directly and now can add uninstaller actions to remove the web server configurations.

Here’s the changes:

• Updated Apache configuration; tries to look for directives already existing and comments them out. Also removes the added directives on uninstall.
• Remove IIS configuration on uninstall.
• Force installer to be run by an administrator; should help with Vista issues.
• Other bug fixes ( see list )

The next Release Candidate build should have the changes.

Things that are new to the installer for PHP 5.2.1:

• Support for configuring PHP as an ISAPI module.
• Support for configuring PHP for IIS 7 in CGI and ISAPI modes ( Thanks to David Wang for writing a guide on how to do it ).
• Rolling all the IIS Server options into two choices ( IIS CGI and IIS ISAPI ) where the installer will do the right thing based upon the version of Windows you have.
• Some bug fixes ( see the list )

Thanks to everyone who submitted bug reports; you should be seeing those fixes appearing in the upcoming Release Candidates for PHP 5.2.1.

I finally have the updates to the PHP Manual for using the new installer, check it out at http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.installer.msi.php. It goes into advanced usage for command line installations and the various options you have when doing one. A definite must read if you want to deploy PHP via Group Policies or a silent installation.

Thanks to the phpdoc team for letting me add this documentation ( and special thanks to Nuno Lopes for ( patiently ) helping me get the documentation correctly formatted ).