I've been given an existing PHP application that was originally deployed on a LAMP host.
Because most of our team are .Net developers, our boss wants it deployed in a windows environment.
Is it madness to expect this to just work?
Here's some additional info of the LAMP host:
Linux 2.4.32
PHP 5.2.6
No non-default modules
In my experience, it can be done and works fine.
The most important things I'd keep in mind are:
Use Apache on Windows, don't use IIS (even if it's possible)
Make sure you use unix style slashes for directories. Those work on both platforms.
Be very careful with case sensitivity. Since Windows is not case sensitive (though it is case preserving), if you include a file and spell it with the wrong case, it will work on Windows and fail on Linux.
Heck even just migrating from one hosted server to a different one usually requires SOME tweaking and adjustments. I don't imagine having to do it in a Windows environment would be much different. I was invloved in the migration of a large PHP app just last week and we (3 people) were able to get things going in about half a day.
It depends what's being done in the application. Two areas to look into though are where the app looks for files in the file system (using Linux specific paths?) and finding windows builds of any php modules (from PECL in particular).
Be very careful that at no point is exec called. A lot of extremely lazy code is written that will use this, and for obvious reasons it may not port well.
Some what i've experienced over the years:
Too old/new DB driver for PHP
Path problems
Change from 32 bit to 64 bit system or vice versa affects PHP internal integer handling (bit calculations returns weird results suddenly)
Locale and localization issues
Missing functions (manual have usually notes that it won't work or behaves differentially in windows)
File name casing
And always check and double check that Apache modules and PHP modules are atleast the same version as in old system.
It's also not too bad to run GNU/Linux virtualized on top of Windows with for example VMWare if code doesn't seem to like running in Windows.
Related
I am developing a website with Lumen framework.
Everything is configured and works perfectly locally. However, this is not the case on the remote server.
Examples:
When I recover a data from my database, even if the column contains only integers, the result in local is integer, but in remote : string. I have to specify (int) before the integer values to be sure they are integer.
Locally, all my classes belong to namespaces. Everything works locally and in remote, sometimes I find myself with Class 'blabla\blibli' not found
Locally, I use Xampp (PHP Version 5.6.14, MySQL version 5.0.11-dev) and remove, I am on a shared server OVH (PHP Version 5.6.15, MySQL version 5.1.73).
Have you ever been confronted with that? Is there a way to fix this? May be a configuration file to write?
EDIT : Given the comments below, it seems that the answers to my questions actually depends on the operating system use.
Locally, I am working on a Windows machine, while in remote, it is a machine running Linux. Windows seems less of a hassle with certain rules, such as case sensitive.
When I recover a data from my database, even if the column contains
only integers, the result in local is integer, but in remote : string.
I have to specify (int) before the integer values to be sure they are
integer.
This happens because PHP doesn't know how to interpret the query result. There is no information on how to interpret column values. To fix that and to have correct type representation in PHP, you must have MySQL Native Driver installed (mysqlnd).
Here's a link to documentation page that explains how to do it.
Locally, all my classes belong to namespaces. Everything works locally
and in remote, sometimes I find myself with Class 'blabla\blibli' not
found
As per comments, it appears you're developing on one OS and deploying on another OS. Since Windows are actually MUCH MUCH WORSE than Linux (and this isn't me being a fan of Linux, it's a simple fact), they tend to forgive a lot when it comes to case sensitivity and what not.
Windows being forgiving for such things doesn't mean they're better or that there's less hassle with Windows (from a sys admin POV, Windows are a nightmare). It just means that you can't be lazy and expect OS to forgive everything and guess how you intended your code to work.
Be consistent
Set your development environment to match your deployment environment. You can use virtual machines for that. If you prefer developing under Windows, you can use Oracle Virtualbox to run a Linux OS, set up Samba and in Windows you can map a Linux drive. That lets you run your IDE under Windows, and all the code is saved to Linux box. Your web server and php should run under Linux and you can access it via your browser that runs under Windows
Set up tests. Run them before you deploy. That will tell you whether you might have missed or omitted something
Be consistent
Good luck.
I want to develop a professional website using PHP and MySQL. Can i do it in Windows 7 (64-bit) or i need to install linux based OS. How to go for it.
You can run an AMP Stack (Apache, mySQL, PHP) on Windows no problem. I have been doing this for ten years now. Running on Windows 7 64-bit is also no problem.
There are several pre-packaged installers available. My favourite is XAMPP. They usually allow full customization where needed.
You can also download the stand-alone binaries of each product and install them manually. Makes for very, very good learning but is more work.
Yes, you can.
Though a platform is the least thing you will need...
As mentioned it is possible to develop Php and MySQL sites quite happily on Windows using something like XAMPP, even if they are later to be deployed on a Linux web server and I know a lot of people do this and it works great for them.
However I have found in the past you can run into problems later on this way. For example, a lot of people who have only used Windows in the past can get caught out by case-sensitivity in Linux. So your site runs great locally but then you start getting lots of 404 errors when you go live because for example, mypage.php is not the same as myPage.php any more.
At the other end of the development spectrum, you can achieve some really powerful functionality when you start to work the server a bit more - things like video encoding or audio conversion are possible using PHP (with a bit of help from some other apps) on both Windows and Linux but the ways that you would do it are different therefore your development environment becomes much less useful and again you run the risk of putting something live that doesn't work, even tho it runs fine when you test it locally.
Personally, I think it is always best to develop on as close an environment to the intended production server as you can to avoid any nasty surprises when you go live.
Develop on the same platform you are going to be deploying to (if possible). It'll make it extremely easy to deploy with less room for possible error.
Installing the 64-bit versions Apache/PHP/MySQL on Windows 7 is a bit of a pain, but you can easily install the 32-bit versions using XAMPP (as mentioned by Pekka) from apachefriends.org
For Windows you can use a light package, which content php, apache, mysql, pear. link text
the linux environment is natural to php,
what are the Advantages and disadvantages with run php on windows ?
Are there some limits in windows ?
what is the best (lamp/wamp) in term of performance ?
thanks
It's not so much that it is natural on Linux but the tendency was for developers to use PHP in the earlier days as the ASP on Linux. For years MS never even mentioned PHP and never gave it any support and so most development work happened in the Linux arena with the result that it is more advanced as it has simply had more development hours spent on it.
Again in the early days it was more difficult to get PHP running on ISS but apache makes it easier but then you need to install it. I rarely develop on Windows but i think the environment has changed for the better with more integration.
The emergence of packages such as XAMPP and WAMPP make installation and running a lot easier but as Karsten says not really for the production environment as they are not geared for it in performance and especially on the security level, because of this i also doubt if they are geared for performance, they are geared for ease of install and development.
Case sensitivity can be a problem if you develop in Windows and later move to Linux.
Well, there's the obvious problem of trying to compile PECL extensions on a Windows platform, and the problems associated with not having sendmail running and trying to use the mail function.
Other than that, as long as the source has been ported correctly, it should do fine.
There is an Site from Microsoft for this http://php.iis.net/
For good Performance also check out http://www.iis.net/expand/fastcgi
I can't give you performance statistics. Would guess that an extremely stripped-down version of Linux or BSD is best from that standpoint.
There are two main disadvantages of Windows. One is that you're likely to have to build some of the lesser-used extensions yourself, if you need them. (There are Windows builds of the common stuff - APC, etc. - available on the net for 32-bit, though. For 64-bit Windows... well, it's a jungle out there.) The other is that you're going to be in the minority, so expect all the things that go hand-in-hand with that. (If you run into configuration difficulty, for example, there will probably be fewer people able to help you.)
The advantage is that (especially if your favorite IDE is something like Visual Studio) you can run all your favorite Windows stuff on the machine. This is really only an advantage if this is, say, a development box - something you're going to use for other purposes as well, not just as a server.
If you are working in an windows environment, running your application/php scripts there makes a lot of sense if you want to debug locally.
I wouldn't use WAMP for production environments, because its nature is in linux imho.
XAMPP solves the sendmail issue amphetamachine is talking about by installing mercury mail.
It also comes with prebuilt xdebug, apc and memcache modules, which are for me the usual pecl compiled extensions.
An obvious problem with PHP on Windows/Apache is not being able to configure PHP APC for current versions of PHP. Hence, no way to create elegant file uploads with progress bar.
Most and main PHP developers (I mean, those that create the language) seem to work under Unix platform. Also, almost all Linux distros take care of building, packing and fixing PHP to suit their systems. And this also applies to auxiliary software like Apache. As a result:
There's always some functionality that doesn't work on Windows, e.g. strptime() or has more bugs.
Windows binaries are not optimized for your system. You can't even get 64 bit binaries unless you compile them yourself.
The MSI installers are not as polished as they should.
Installing PECL extensions is very complicate since there aren't official DLLs.
Of course, there's also Windows-only functionality in PHP, such as Windows only extensions or third-party extensions like the Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP, or functionality that's way easier to use under Windows, such as ODBC.
Talking about performance itself, it's difficult to make a fair comparison. The operating systems themselves have very different hardware requirements and it'd be misleading to compare optimized Unix builds with generic Windows binaries. My intuition says that the decision of choosing either platform should be based in other considerations, such as budget, required features or ease of maintenance.
There are many quirks across platforms with PHP, and I don't recommend switching between LAMP / BAMP / SAMP and WAMP / WIMP.
For one thing, permissions are completely different -> usually being a lot harder to work with in Unix/Linux (as Windows doesn't seem to care all that much about permissions as far as I have ever seen). This is a good thing, in my opinion, though (I'm relatively safety paranoid).
Here are a couple more things that differ:
http://php.net/touch (could't change windows directory modified times until 5.3)
http://php.net/flush (still can't flush or ob_flush from some win32 machines)
Both have system specific issues that were just SUPER recently worked out or haven't been fixed yet...
There is a PHP application right now on a Linux box running under Apache with MySQL. Since we are a windows shop, management wants to get rid of the Linux box and move everything over to windows. Is there a performance difference between the two platforms? Or, is there any significant difference at all, in terms of performance or management?
Microsoft had a team help out optimising PHP for Windows, which work is part of PHP 5.3. Some figures I've seen places the performance close to PHP + Apache on a unix system. Before 5.3 (Which means currently, since 5.3 isn't out yet), performance is bad on Windows. I think there are some patches and tricks you can pull to improve it, but it's going to cost you a bit of performance. That may or may not be a problem; People have a tendency to overestimate performance.
Note that there are other reasons to use unix than just performance. Code may not be portable and even though the core php runs fairly ok, you can well get into trouble with php-extensions and third party libraries. No matter how you look at it, Windows is a second-rate system for running php on.
If your application isn't huge or get hit a couple thousand times per second, there's no difference between the two.
LAMP == WAMP in php small projects. Just install something like XAMPP if you want your environment to be as close as possible to your existing one but in Windows.
Good luck with your project!
You should consider the MS WebPI (download at www.microsoft.com/web ) which would install the entire stack for you to run PHP in IIS7 environment.
the performance is comparable for most apps.
I've just done this for the same reason. Mgt wanted to get rid of the Linux box. I was able to completely move my php application and MySQL database. It took longer for me to configure PHP for IIS than it did for me to move the existing content over.
I have found though that the IIS server is a fair bit slower when it comes to loading pages and images. Where in Linux it appeared instantaneous, in IIS it takes a half second for the page to load and another second for images.
In few months I start a project in PHP and I am hesitating to do like usual : develop on my Windows Vista 64bits machine. Since I know few things on Linux, I think it can be a good way to learn by working on a Linux distribution.
Do you think it's a good idea or not? I would run a VirtualBox with Ubuntu (on my Vista64bits). I was thinking to install XAMPP to be able to develop in PHP.
If you think it's a good idea, feel free to suggest me some tutorial about what I should know with Virtualizing an OS, or Linux/dev.
Update
I have build many website in PHP with Windows, the question is more about if it's a good way to start learning Linux by developing on it via a Virtual machine? I have 4 gigs rams, will it be smooth if I install Eclipse in the Virtual Machine? etc.
You should really develop on the same platform where you are going to deploy. I'm not saying it is bad to do differently, but it can save you some pain in the long run. OTOH, you might learn faster about platform differences that way. So, the main question is: do you want to have a production system running ASAP without much headache? Or, you want to spend some time and make some effort to learn how to develop cross-platform stuff?
And yes, there are differences. For example, case sensitive and case in-sensitive filenames. Then, some PHP functions use native C functions that have different implementation. For example, printf() does not produce the same amount of whitespace for some of the types. Resolution of time measurement (milliseconds vs microseconds) can be different, etc. Then, you have different ways filesystem permissions are handled. These are just some recent problems I've found that I can remember off the top of my head.
PHP should be the same on any platform - so where you develop shouldn't matter.
However, in my experience and observation,more sites running PHP are running on Linux than Windows.
Getting Apache and PHP setup on something like Ubuntu or Fedora is a cinch, and testing everything is pretty simple, too.
Also, when you go live with your site, what platform will it be running on? I prefer to do development on the platform it will be running on whenever possible.
Personally, I don't think that for local production you should be using a VM. Would you be running your IDE inside the VM too?
If you are aware enough of the pitfalls of moving between Windows and Linux environments (such as case sensitivity and permissions), you should have no problem developing on Windows and deploying on Linux.
Working on a Linux distribution is defnitely the easiest way to learn it. And setting up some servers and doing some dev work is an excellent start.
Virtualising Linux is also really easy. I've done it quite a few times and it's really obious. Also, going this way will ease you into using Linux, much better than just jumping in and finding out your wireless card is unsupported like I did :)
As for PHP development on Linux... I've done some PHP coding on Windows and on Linux and I can tell you there's very little difference between the two. I use Eclipse on both platforms and Apache &MySQL / XAMPP. The only major difference I've seen is that Linux is much more finicky about permissions and case.
PHP is not the same on all platforms, and until very recently the windows versions had problems which were not found in the Linux versions. Lots of useful features are *nix specific.
I would echo #Milan's sentiments about developing in the deployment environment. You learn a lot more about the deployment environment by doing so too.
On the VM issue, if you want all your Windows tools and your windows machine, setup a linux server in your VM (can have a GUI if you want, but you're going to mainly use it as a server). Set it up so that windows can view the apache install running in your VM and you use samba shares to access the vm's files like a drive in windows. That way, you develop in windows but are testing deploy / setup on a running linux server. While two devs at my shop run Ubuntu, a third needs to use Photoshop and various other bits of windows software all the time, so she uses this method of running a server in a VM but developing from windows.
Oh, and if you're running on Linux, don't use XAMPP! A few simple commands will have you up and running and you'll get a much better understanding of your deploy. XAMPP is fine, but it's for OS's that don't have Linux's package management.
while XAMPP works great, running Apache and PHP on Linux is a given; while on Windows it's something extra you have to do... and support. Also, most parts of the stack are far more optimised and mature for a POSIX environment. The database engine(s) performance is particularly sensitive to the available primitives.
Most OSS runs on windows, but it's a round peg whammed on a square hole.
On principle, I would advise against "learning by doing" in a real project - unless it it really small, or you have doen very similar projects before, so that the learning curve on project related issues would not be steep. In that case you may have ressources free for learning about the developing environment.
Generally I like the Linux environment better than Windows. Mainly because all the CLI tools you would need are provided and Bash beats cmd.ext any time. But with Cygwin I find even Windows a comfortable development environment.
Regarding PHP development I can't really see how it would be much different. Maybe there is some benefit in being forced to make the code more portable (things like line endings, forward slashes in filenames and such) if you use booth systems.
As a desktop or workstation there isn't much difference between the two. I find that the biggest differences lies in how you administer them, but hopefullt you have some other people doing that for you.
In my opinion you needn't to develop in a linux distribution.
Web Development can be done from any OS. I don't know, why you are programming for the web... as a professional? for your personal homepage?
I think, it's enough to get some free webspace running a PHP Server and to upload your files there... it doesn't take you much time and there are less things to manage.
a german student ;)
Use the OS your deployment server will be running, and it is highly probable to be linux. I have recently seen a deployment gone ultra bad cuz it was developed using wampserver and deployed on CentOS. With major differences in apache and PHP config. So know your deployment server and match it as closely as possible.
Try creating a development environment using VmWare Player. I have several Linux environments that I run on my Vista laptop. You could also just dual boot. I use Ubuntu, it is easy.
The side effect of developing inside a VM: more overhead and eventually the needs of additional tools to make the development more comfortable.
Often people need special tools for their development like Photoshop or some vector design tools not available on Linux. If the working copy of the project is inside the VM, it makes sense to have easy access to it. So you will setup SAMBA (which makes often problems with the login from XP) or setup SSL(SFTP)/FTP.
Also you must learn how to use networking with the VM (NAT, bridging, port forwarding).
On the other side, developing on another platform as the target can give some headache. I found myself often confused with .htaccess files for password protection, because oft the different path on Windows/Linux. If you forget to change this entries later on the production server, you have a problem...
A better solution: use the best of both worlds.
A VM eventually running later headless (no gui, more like a "remote server") with Ubuntu/Debian/FreeBSD) and only running the needed servers (Apache, MySQL, FTP, SSH...).
Eclipse or the other development tools on Windows/Mac.
5 years later: My opinion is to use the Linux solution. There are many advantages for using PHP in Linux. The primary reason is the level of help available from the community. PHP seems to be optimized for Linux environments as well.
There is also safety in numbers as an overwhelming number of sites are hosted and run with LAMP solutions. There are a wide range of frameworks and CMS' that run best on Linux with Apache2.
Make your life easier and start learning PHP straight away.