Apache 2.2 support coming in PHP 5.2.0

A lot of people have come to grief trying to install PHP with the Apache 2.2 series on Windows. They go to the Apache download page, see that Apache 2.2.3 is described as “the best available version”, and naturally assume that it’s the one they should use. Unfortunately, the Apache dynamic link libraries distributed with the Windows version of PHP (up to and including PHP 5.1.6) support only Apache 2.0 or Apache 1.3.

That’s finally about to change with the release of PHP 5.2.0, which is currently in the release candidate stage. I have been running PHP 5.2.0RC3 for the past few days with Apache 2.2.3, and everything seems to be working smoothly. There are appear to be no conflicts with Dreamweaver 8 or phpMyAdmin 2.8.2.4.

If you already have a testing environment that’s working satisfactorily, I don’t think there’s any point upgrading from Apache 2.0 to Apache 2.2 just to get the latest version. However, if you’re installing Apache for the first time (or on a new machine), it does mean you will soon be able to choose whichever version takes your fancy. The only difference in the configuration is that you need to use php5apache2_2.dll instead of php5apache2.dll. Assuming that you have installed PHP in C:\php5, the appropriate line in httpd.conf looks like this:

LoadModule php5_module C:/php5/php5apache2_2.dll

If you’re absolutely desperate to use Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.2.0, you can download the Windows zip file for PHP 5.2.0RC3 now. The PHP team stopped linking to release candidates on the PHP download site a couple of years ago, but there are plans to resume this practice soon in the interests of getting more people to test them before releasing the final version. There have been a couple of embarrassing cases of a “stable” version needing to be updated after only a couple of days when a small, but vital part of the code was discovered to have introduced a new bug.

17 comments September 3rd, 2006