In order to work on PHP environment we need different amount of software’s which basically provide us a platform where we can work on PHP.  Once the required software has been obtained, the next step is to install the various pieces and get them talking to each other. In this series of article we will guide you about the installation process  for both

• Installation on UNIX platform
• Installation on Windows platforms.

First of all we will guide you about what are the installation processes on UNIX.

Installing on UNIX platform

The installation process for UNIX involves a number of distinct steps: installing MySQL from a binary distribution, using the supplied MySQL client libraries to compile PHP from a source distribution, and compiling and configuring Apache to properly handle requests for PHP web pages. These steps are described in greater detail in the following subsections.

There are basically three sub steps present in the installation process on UNIX platform

1- Installing Supporting Libraries.

2- Installing MySQL

3- Installing Apache and PHP

Installing Supporting Libraries

If you’re using PHP 5.x, you might need to install some supporting libraries first: libxml2 2.6.0 (or better), which is used by the new XML API in PHP 5.x, and zlib 1.0.9 (or better), which provides compression services to many PHP 5.x extensions. If you already have these libraries installed, skip to the next section. If not, use the following steps to install them.

1. Log in as the system’s root user.
[user@host]# su – root

2. Extract the contents of the libxml2 archive to the system’s temporary directory.

[root@host]# cd /tmp
[root@host]# tar -xzvf /tmp/libxml2-2.6.11.tar.gz

3. Next, change into the newly created directory and set variables for the compile process via the included configure script (note my use of the –prefix argument to configure, which sets the default installation path for the compiled libraries).

[root@host]# cd /tmp/libxml2-2.6.11
[root@host]# ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/

You should see a few screens of output as configure configures and sets up the variables needed for the compilation process.

4. Now, compile the library using make, and install it to the system using make install.
[root@host]# make
[root@host]# make install

At the end of this process, the libxml2 library should be installed to
/usr/local/.

In a similar manner, compile and install the zlib library as well.