Download the latest production version for your operating system - The current (7/11/03) production version is 4.0.16 and my office machine is Windows 2000,
so I downloaded mysql-4.0.16-win.zip to c:
Unzip the file to a new directory c:\mysql
Run the installer: c:\mysql\SETUP.EXE
It installs to c:\mysql by default.
Run the mysqladmintool : c:\mysql\winmysqladmin.exe
Set a server username and password
This tool will ensure that the server (For me this is c:\mysql\in\mysqld-nt.exe) will be started on startup. It will put an icon in the status bar (like traffic lights) – this can be used to stop and start the server. The server must be running for PHP scripts to be able to connect to the database, or just to run the mysql command line tool.
The command line interface is C:\mysql\bin\mysql.exe - make a short cut to this file on the desktop.
There are two initial databases : mysql containing admin tables and test which is empty. There are no usercodes or passwords set by default.
Start the command line interface
enter
show databases;
there will be two, mysql and test
use mysql
show tables
there should be six tables, beginning with columns_priv
Download the latest production version for your operating system - I downloaded
php-4.3.5-installer.exe
This will install and configure the local web server - which in my case is IIS
By default this will install in C:\php
Create a basic php script, hello.php:
<?php print "hello"; ?>
and save to the server www home directory.
Note: for IIS the root is C:\Inetpub\wwwroot. If you are unsure of its location, enter http://localhost/ in a browser. The browser will load a default file – for IIS it is
localstart.asp. Now you can use Start/Find to locate the directory in which this file lives.
In Internet explorer, run the script with a URL:
http://localhost/hello.php
The browser should display 'hello'
To see all the PHP settings, add the line:
phpinfo();
Edit the hello.php script to include a statement to connect to MySQL:
if(!($dbresult=mysql_connect("localhost","","")) {
print "failed to connect";
}
Run the script from the browser.
Note the empty usercode and password - defaults until you change them in MySQL
To check you can read tables, add these lines to list the tables in a database:
$res=mysql_db_query("mysql","show tables",$dbresult);
while($ta=mysql_fetch_object($res)) {
print ("<br/>$ta->Tables_in_mysql");
}
** change this to access the rows as arrays – avoids having to know the name of this column, since it changes with the database
PHP defaults are set in the php.ini file in c:\WINNT. These work ok but to run my scripts, you will need to turn register_globals on, so find the line
register_globals = off
and edit off to on