PHP development with CodeIgniter : Getting Started [1]

As I’ve already said here, I’ve started using CodeIgniter for my application development.I will be documenting what ever I learn during this development as a series of blog posts. The first post in this series will be Getting Started with PHP development.

Setting up the PHP development environment

Before starting the development, we need to setup the development environment first. Either we could install PHP, Database and web server software seperately or we can use the packaged applications which comes with all the required software built in a single software.

XAMPP is such a software which contains Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl and is great to quickly start with the development. Get XAMPP from its website. By default XAMPP installs in C:\xampp folder. To start using the XAMPP server, open the “xampp-control” application and start the Apache and MySQL servers from the control panel.

Configuring XAMPP server:

After installing XAMPP server, it will be better if we could do little security changes in the Apache server. By default, the Apache server is visible to anyone in the network. To avoid this and make the Apache only visible to the local machine, we need to modify the [xampp]/apache/conf/httpd.conf file as below:

<Directory "c:/xampp/htdocs">
...
Allow from all
</Directory>

to

<Directory "c:/xampp/htdocs">
...
Allow from 127.0.0.1
</Directory>

After this change, search for the string Listen 80 in the httpd.conf file and change the string to Listen 127.0.0.1:80. This will ensure that Apache is only available for the local machine.

Also, it is recomended to change the MySQL server’s root user password, because by default MySQL server installed with no password for the root user.

PHP Development IDE:

A simple Notepad++ will do for the PHP development. But if you need more features like debugging and code help, then Eclipse PDT would be a good option. One more advantage in using an IDE is we can also dubug PHP applications from the IDE itself, which will not be possible if we just use a text editor.

In the next part of this series, I will be explaining how to install and configure CodeIgniter framework.