PHP and Cygwin
I’ve been having some problems with PHP and Apache 2 on windows recently. I would be doing some development work and refreshing the page to test progress and after some short time Apache would stall and require a restart. I tracked the problem down to using the binary module that comes with PHP. If that module was removed from the Apache configuration, the webserver would be just fine - but without PHP running.
So, I took a look at cygwin to see whether PHP could be made to work with it. I already had the Apache 2 webserver package installed, so all I needed was PHP. Looking at the official PHP packages, there is no support for PHP. After some searching around the net I found a blog called Cygwin Ports. This is linked to a sourceforge project and it has a PHP 5.2.5 package for cygwin.
Installing packages from Cygwin Ports was as easy as adding the URL ftp://sunsite.dk/projects/cygwinports to the cygwin server list. So, I followed the instructions for including their package, installed PHP and wrote a quick test script using only phpinfo():
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
I typed http://localhost/index.php and Success!
The next step was to get something more complex working, specifically CMS Made Simple. But I’ll leave that for next time.