So you want a killer web site? And you have heard that Apache, PHP and MySQL are highly regarded tools for easily creating a dynamic web site that delivers as fast as it can, and best of all they are all free. If you have no idea where to start or need some help on how to install, configure and tweak these great tools, here is a no-nonsense, hands-on article to guide you before you get lost in manuals. I don't mean the manuals that come with these three applications are bad at all, but they can be overwhelming for beginners. No matter which operating system you use (Windows, or some variant of Unix - e.g. FreeBSD or Linux), I will show you both the basics and tricky bits without getting technical. Here is our really short table of contents. Feel free to skip some parts of this article, but I recommend reading it from beginning to end. After all it doesn't aim to be a bible, so I tried to make it as concise as possible.
Learn how to compile a custom-built version of PHP 5 from the source, and replace the stock build on a FreeBSD VPS server from Verio. The purpose of the custom-build is to install some extensions that can not be dynamically loaded and must be compiled in, specifically tidy and zip. These notes show how to build the Apache 2 shared module and CLI versions of PHP, but not the CGI version.
In this article we are going to compile PHP as Apache 2 shared module because there is no option, in case of Apache 2, to compile PHP as Apache static module. It was possible with Apache versions prior to version 2.
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