FWAP64 Setup

Created by: Lester Caine, Last modification: 10 Sep 2016 (16:56 BST)

This is a little out of date now, and has been replace by a  new re-write on the enquirysolve site - but it seems to have gone missing sometime.

Despite everything we try to do to ensure content is not lost, invariably something goes wrong. It would seem that the transfer of enquirysolve website from 1&1 to our own servers at Sheffield did not go quite to plan, and the wrong database was restored after the move. As it was some time before the mistake was picked up, backups that probably contained a later version has been lost. So a few months of material typed into that site have been lost, including a lot of material relating to handing the building and installing of the we stack on Windows.
The current plan is to start again with a clean sheet and the first page of that is right up to date with Compile PHP7 Build on Windows 10.

This is left for reference and the updated one will be restored when time permits. The increasing problems with keeping windows machines running necesitate porting even more often to a Linux base.

Having installed a 64 bit version of Vista in order to play with compiling the php_interbase the obvious net step was to try out Firebird 64 build, which installed and ran fine. Moving on from that what about Apache and PHP ...

There are no official builds of either for 64 bit windows, but while researching some of the other problems with getting php_interbase built on PHP5.3, some useful links came up, and while I still have problems with php_interbase, I do have a fully functional Apache/PHP setup on the machine ...

BlackDot downloads provide a VC9 based x64 build of Apache 2.2.11 - Just grab the first zip file and unpack it.
hostwaves downloads have a matching 5.2.8 build to go with that complete with a matching eaccelerator build.
We now have an experimental 5.3 build hosted on my 1&1 server so download should be reasonably quick
php-5.3.0RC3-dev-Win64 I've moved the MySQL specific stuff currently included by default back to shared libraries, so they are not loaded for a pure Firebird only installation.The snapshot.txt file in the main directory lists all of the bits currently included and the shared libs. Some of the libraries have been copied from the Blackdot apache distribution and so we need to tidy that up at some point. eaccelerator from the latest code is here, but not compiling. I had hoped to sort that before publishing, but the 5.2 to 5.3 changes need more work to get it to build.

ApacheLounge provides a Apache on Win64 forum where the latest updates are discussed and advertised.
 

Installing

While I know this is not the normal way to configure things, I've found that keeping all of the web site programs in the one place gives an easier view of things, so my starting point nowadays is to create a base directory - c:\Network and then install everything to that directory.

 

  1. Firebird gets installed to c:\Network\Firebird_2_1
  2. Unzip the BlackDot binaries to c:\Network\ and that will create an httpd-2.2-x64 directory with the Apache package
  3. It is worth just checking that Apache runs at this point. Open a Command Prompt ... cd \Network\httpd-2.2-x64\bin ... httpd ... Open browser to localhost and you should see 'It Works' ... close Command Prompt
  4. Unzip the 5.3.0 zip to c:\Network\php-5.3.0 as there is no base directory in the zip file
  5. c:\Network\httpd-2.2-x64\conf\httpd.conf needs to be extended to add PHP and it's convenient to put the php.ini in the apache/conf directory although if you are running more than one copy of PHP, then each would have it's own copy and httpd.conf would need to be changed along with the LoadModule. Config and Test Files has a simple setup to enable PHP and Firebird. Unzip and copy the two .php files to c:\Network\httpd-2.2-x64\htdocs and the other two to c:\Network\httpd-2.2-x64\conf ( I'll tidy this zip up later )
  6. Restart apache as above, and browse to localhost\index.php which should give the normal phpinfo display showing everything enable.
  7. The other .php file is the Firebird php quick test - The copy of FB I installed had not included the example employee database so localhost\ibtest.php will need the full path - c:\Network\Firebird_2_1\exmples\empbuild\EMPLOYEE.FDB although at this point it is probably worth grabbing the x64 build of FlameRobin to complement the suite. For convenience I install this to the c:\Network directory as well, rather than "c:\Program Files" ( who ever thought spaces in file names was a good idea! )

 

 

To Do

 

It would be nice to get eaccelerator working with this since it does give a nice performance improvement to Apache/PHP, and ImageMagick is another extension that I need to sort out.

 

eaccelerator Ticket

 

with details of how to get latest code.

 

ImageMagick sources

 

as the only x64 binary is a static build.

 

 

Next step on the x64 front is to get Eclipse installed on the Vista64 machine so that I can be a little more productive on software. Trying to work around the limitations of the VSExpress setup is going to take too long, and as the PHP compile proces is shell based, I can run this from Eclipse quite happily.