Chapter 1. Setting Up the Environment

PHP 7 has finally been released. For a long time, the PHP community was talking about it and has still not stopped. The main improvement in PHP 7 is its performance. For a long time, the PHP community faced performance issues in large-scale applications. Even some small applications with high traffic faced performance issues. Server resources were increased, but it did not help much because in the end the bottleneck was PHP itself. Different caching techniques were used, such as APC, and this helped a little. However, the community still needed a version of PHP that could boost the application's performance at its peak. And this is where PHPNG comes in.

PHPNG stands for PHP next generation. It is a completely separate branch and is mainly targeted for performance. Some people thought that PHPNG is JIT (Just In Time) compilation, but in reality, PHPNG is based on a refactored Zend Engine, which was highly optimized for performance. PHPNG is used as a base for PHP 7 development, and according to the official PHP wiki page, the PHPNG branch is now merged into the master branch.

Before starting to build an application, the development environment should be finalized and configured. In this chapter, we will discuss setting up the development environment on different systems, such as Windows and different flavors of Linux.

We will cover the following topics:

Setting up Windows
Setting up Ubuntu or Debian
Setting up CentOS
Setting up Vagrant

All other environments can be skipped, and we can set up the environment that we will use.

Setting up Windows

There are many tools available that have Apache, PHP, and MySQL bundled for Windows, provide easy installation, and are very easy to use. Most of these tools already provide support for PHP 7 with Apache, such as through XAMPP, WAMPP, and EasyPHP. EasyPHP is the only one that also provides support for NGINX and provides easy steps to changes webserver from NGINX to Apache or Apache to Nginx.

Note

XAMPP is also available for Linux and Mac OS X. However, WAMP and EasyPHP are only available for Windows. Any of these three can be used for this book, but we recommend EasyPHP as it supports NGINX, and for this book, we mostly use NGINX.

Any of the three tools can be used, but we require more control over every element of our web server tools, so we will also install NGINX, PHP 7, and MySQL individually and then connect them together.

Note

NGINX Windows binaries can be downloaded from http://nginx.org/en/download.html. We recommend using a stable version, though there is no problem with using a mainline version. PHP Windows binaries can be downloaded from http://windows.php.net/download/. Download either 32-bit or 64-bit binaries of the non-thread safe version according to your system.

Perform the following steps:

Download NGINX and PHP Windows binaries mentioned in the information box. Copy NGINX to a suitable directory. For example, we have a completely separate D drive for development purposes. Copy NGINX to this development drive or any other directory. Now, copy PHP either to the NGINX directory or to any other secure folder location.
In the PHP directory, there will be two .ini files, php.ini-development and php.ini-production. Rename either one of them to php.ini. PHP will be using this configuration file.
Hold the Shift key and right click in the PHP directory to open the command-line window. The command-line window will be opened in the same location path. Issue the following command to start PHP:
```
php-cgi –b 127.0.0.1:9000
```
The –b option starts PHP and binds to the path for external FastCGI servers. The preceding command binds PHP to loop back the 127.0.0.1 IP on port 9000. Now, PHP is accessible on this path.
To configure NGINX, open the nginx_folder/conf/nginx.conf file. The first thing to do is to add root and index to the server block, as follows:
```
server {
  root html;
  index index.php index.html index.htm;
```
Now, we need to configure NGINX to use PHP as FastCGI on the path mentioned before on which it is started. In the nginx.conf file, uncomment the following location block for PHP:
```
location ~ \.php$ {
  fastcgi_pass    127.0.0.1:9000;
  fastcgi_param    SCRIPT_FILENAME complete_path_webroot_folder$fastcgi_script_name;
include    fastcgi_params;
}
```
Note the fastcgi_param option. The highlighted complete_path_webroot_folder path should be the absolute path to the HTML directory inside the nginx folder. Let's say that your NGINX is placed at the D:\nginx path; then, the absolute path to the HTML folder will be D:\nginx\html. However, for the preceding fastcgi_param option, \ should be replaced by /.
Now, restart NGINX by issuing the following command in the root of the NGINX folder:
```
nginx –s restart
```
After NGINX is restarted, open your browser and enter the IP or hostname of your Windows server or machine, and we will see the NGINX welcome message.
Now, to verify the PHP installation and its working with NGINX, create an info.php file in webroot and enter the following code in it:
```
<?php
  phpinfo();
?>
```
Now, in the browser, access your_ip/info.php, and we will be presented with a page full of PHP and server information. Congratulations! We configured NGINX and PHP to work perfectly together.
Note
On Windows and Mac OS X, we recommend that you use a virtual machine installed with all the tools on a Linux flavor to get the best performance out of the server. It is easy to manage everything in Linux. There are vagrant boxes available that have everything ready to use. Also, a custom virtual machine configuration with all the tools, including NGINX, Apache, PHP 7, Ubuntu, Debian, or CentOS, and other great ones, can be made at https://puphpet.com, which is an easy-to-use GUI. Another nice tool is Laravel Homestead, which is a Vagrant box with great tools.

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Setting up Debian or Ubuntu

Table of Contents for PHP 7: Real World Application Development

Chapter 1. Setting Up the Environment

Setting up Windows

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PHP 7: Real World Application Development