PHP … MySQL … MyPHPAdmin … Oh My! - Sun, 12 Apr 2009

So it only took about 5 days to get just about everything configured on my new machine. Three days ago, I set up Delphi, got Behold compiling and found a few Vista-based bugs that I quickly squashed. I even put up a black based 2560 x 1024 background from a poster on the New Horizons mission to Pluto website. Of course, that turned me into a super-nerd in the opinion of both my daughters.

So the one last thing left was to set up my webpage development environment. That involved setting up IIS (Internet Information Server) and downloading and installing the PHP scripting language, the mySQL database, and the phpMyAdmin program to manage the mySQL database. I had this all set up before on my old computer, but I remember back then that it wasn’t as easy as it should have been to set up. So I wasn’t looking forward to it.

Two nights ago, I started the process. I found an excellent article to Set up IIS 7 with MySQL and PHP 5. Having a new 64-bit OS, I decided to take him the writer up on using the 64-bit version of PHP and MySQL. I installed them and they worked right away, just as he said they would.

Then it was phpMyAdmin. I installed that. It worked, but it gave a warning saying “Your PHP MySQL library version 5.0.19 differs from your MySQL server version 5.1.33. This may cause unpredictable behavior.” Needless to say, I didn’t trust leaving it that way.

It only took the next morning after trying to find a simple fix,that the 64 bit PHP package was version 5.2.0, a slightly older version of PHP. I could have pursued that more, but I decided to go back to 32 bit versions that I knew were the latest and would be compatible. Then I had a day and a half of misery as I tried to get it all working again. I must have reinstalled it in various ways a dozen times, searched numerous articles on the web about IIS 7 on Vista 64 with PHP and mySQL.

Finally, an hour ago was the breakthrough and relief. I ran across Installing PHP5 on IIS7 Vista 64. Step 14 mentioned a step I hadn’t seen before, enabling 32 bit apps to run on Win 64. I didn’t have the adsutil.vbs script on my machine, but it led me to realize that 32 BIT APPS ARE NOT ENABLED BY DEFAULT IN 64-BIT IIS 7! (Yes, I’m yelling that!) It then didn’t take long to find that in the Application Pool Defaults, I only had to change the setting “Enable 32-Bit Applications” from false to true, and everything then worked.

Two days of my time spent becoming an expert on IIS 7. Oh well. Going back to the original article, if I had looked further down to Point 3 of Lou’s “Set up PHP in IIS” comment, I could have avoided this whole mess. But picking out the right few lines amongst about 100 blog comments is not the easiest task.