Installing PHP on Windows 7

PHP is one of the most common web languages out there, Windows is the most used operating system in the world… So I’ll take a wild guess and say many PHP developers use Windows, thus have to install PHP on windows to do their work or test their websites before releasing them online. Many developers use bundles like XAMPP Or WAMP to install an Apache server, MySql server and PHP. I personally use Microsoft’s ASP.Net for web development most of the time but sometimes I do things on PHP – which is still an awesome scripting language – so I tried to cut back on the resource consumption and get PHP to work on Windows IIS Server. That was a bit difficult on Windows XP, there were too many things you had to do to get it working. But for Windows 7… Getting PHP to work on IIS will take a couple of minutes if you had a good internet connection. So getting to those steps:

1. Download and install Microsoft Web Platform Installer.
2. Start the web platform installer.
3. While waiting for it to start click on the “Start” button and type “Turn windows features on or off” without the quotes of course.
4. After the window opens go to the “Internet Information Services ==> World Wide Web Services ==> Application Development Features” And make sure CGI is checked, then click the OK button.
5. Go back to the Web Platform Installer, and type PHP in the search box and hit the enter button.
6. When the search results show up, click the “Add” button next to “PHP Manager for IIS”, and press the Install button.
7. Follow the simple dialogs until you’re done, and voilà, you have PHP running on IIS now.

Let me know how it works out for you