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://sourceware.org/pub/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.