Installation on Windows systems

Table of Contents

This section applies to Windows 98/Me and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003. PHP will not work on 16 bit platforms such as Windows 3.1 and sometimes we refer to the supported Windows platforms as Win32.

Note:

Windows 98/Me/NT4 is no longer supported as of PHP 5.3.0.

Note:

Windows 95 is no longer supported as of PHP 4.3.0.

There are two main ways to install PHP for Windows: either manually or by using the installer.

If you have a development environment such as Microsoft Visual Studio, you can also build PHP from the original source code.

Once you have PHP installed on your Windows system, you may also want to load various extensions for added functionality.

Warning

There are several all-in-one installers over the Internet, but none of those are endorsed by PHP.net, as we believe that using one of the official Windows packages from » http://www.php.net/downloads.php is the best choice to have your system secure and optimized.