Dreamweaver Article

1. On Debian Linux, use the apt-get utility to install the apache package:
   
   # apt-get install apache
2. On distributions using RPM packages (such as Red Hat Linux), visit the RPM Resource Page and use rpmfind.net to locate and download an appropriate Apache package. Then, install it with the rpm program:
   
   # rpm --install apache-1.3.27-2.i386.rpm
3. The system generally requires that you install packages with apt-get or rpm as the root user. To change to root, type:
   
   % su -
4. At the Password: prompt, enter the root password that you set up when installing Linux. In this article, the command prompt for lines that should be executed as root is # and the prompt for lines that should be executed as a regular user is %.

1. Select an Apache download mirror by visiting the Apache HTTP Server Project.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find a "Unix Source" link for a version of Apache 1. As of this writing, the current version of Apache 1 is Apache 1.3.27 and the file to download is apache_1.3.27.tar.gz.
3. After you've downloaded the file, uncompress it and extract all of the individual files in the archive with:
   
   % gunzip < apache_1.3.27.tar.gz | tar xvf -
4. Then, change into the directory where the extracted files are:
   
   % cd apache_1.3.27
5. Next, you need to configure Apache's compilation settings with the configure script. There are a number of different options you can pass to configure. Get a look at them all with the --help option:
   
   % ./configure --help
6. Don't forget the ./ before configure. That runs the copy of the configure program in the Apache directory. One option you need to specify to configure is --enable-module=so. This configures Apache to be able to dynamically load modules without recompiling. It's easiest to use PHP as a dynamically loaded module, so this Apache functionality is important. So, at the bare minimum, you want to run:
   
   % ./configure --enable-module=so
7. By default, Apache and its configuration files are installed in the /usr/local/apache directory. You can change this with the --prefix option to configure the location. For example, you can install everything under /opt/apache :
   
   % ./configure --enable-module=so --prefix=/opt/apache
8. You can also change the directories into which Apache is installed by using the --with-layout option. The config.layout file in the Apache distribution describes various directory configurations for where Apache files are installed. GNU is one of the layout configurations mentioned in config.layout. Select one of them like this:
   
   % ./configure --enable-module=so --with-layout=GNU
9. After successful configuration, run make to compile Apache's source code:
   
   % make
10. Then, install Apache with make install:

% su -
# make install

Note: The make install command needs to be run as root , so the su - command changes your permissions to those of the root user.

1. On Debian Linux, type the following:
   
   # cp /usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl /etc/init.d/apache
# update-rc.d apache defaults
2. If you've used the --prefix or --with-layout configuration options for Apache, then substitute the appropriate directory for apachectl.

1. On Debian Linux, type the following:
   
   # apt-get install mysql-server
2. For other Linux distributions, you can find RPMs and regular binary distributions on the MySQL 3.23 Downloads page.
3. As mentioned previously, you must set your permission as the root user when you perform these steps. If you download a binary distribution, uncompress it and extract files from the archive like this:
   
   # cd /usr/local
# gunzip < /tmp/mysql-3.23.55-pc-linux-i686.tar.gz | tar xvf -
# ln -s mysql-3.23.55-pc-linux-i686 mysql
   
   Note: The above assumes that you've downloaded the MySQL binary distribution into the /tmp directory. It extracts the files into /usr/local/mysql-3.23.55-pc-linux-i686 directory, and then creates a symbolic link so that /usr/local/mysql points to the MySQL directory.
4. Follow the instructions in the INSTALL-BINARY file in the MySQL distribution for installing:
   
   # groupadd mysql
# useradd -g mysql mysql
# cd mysql
# scripts/mysql_install_db
# chown -R root .
# chown -R mysql data
# chgrp -R mysql .
5. The groupadd and useradd commands are used to create a specific user and a group, which MySQL will use when it's running. It's good practice to run servers as their own users—otherwise the server usually runs as root, which can cause security problems. Apache automatically runs as the user nobody, so you don't need to do anything special to prevent it from running as root.
   
   The scripts/mysql_install_db program creates some initial tables that MySQL needs to start up. The chown and chgrp commands set the permissions correctly on the MySQL files.

1. Enter the following:
   
   # bin/safe_mysqld --user=mysql &
2. MySQL maintains its own set of users and passwords to control access to data in its databases. These users and passwords are separate from the users and passwords that control access to your Linux server itself. When first installed, MySQL has one user, root , with no password. So the very first thing you should do after installing MySQL is to set a password for that user. Use the mysqladmin command for that:
   
   % mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
3. Substitute what you want the password to be for new-password in the text above. If you installed MySQL with apt-get, then mysqladmin is in your path so you can just type mysqladmin to run it. If you installed the binary distribution into /usr/local, then you need to type the full pathname to mysqladmin:

% /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
4. After setting the password for the root user, you should create a database and a user that can access that database. You'll use that database and user when connecting from PHP.
   
   % mysqladmin -u root -p create mydb
5. This command creates a database called mydb. At the "Password:" prompt, enter your new password. You can use any name for the database that you'd like, as long as it's made up of just letters, numbers, and the underscore symbol ( _).
6. To create a user, run the MySQL console tool as the root user:
   
   % mysql -u root -pNewPassword
   
   At the "Password:" prompt, enter your new password.
   
7. Then issue the following command:
   
   Note: Don't type the mysql> part. That's just the prompt that the MySQL console tool uses.
   
   mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mydb.* TO myuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword';
   
   This command says that the user myuser can do anything it wants to any table in the mydb database, but that myuser has to log in with the password mypassword from the same host that is running the database. The localhost is a special hostname. When a program tries to connect to localhost, it connects to the same host that the program is running on.
8. If you installed the binary distribution but want MySQL to start up when the server does, you need to set this manually. This is similar to the auto-start setting we made for Apache:
   
   # cp /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server /etc/init.d/mysql
# update-rc.d mysql defaults

1. Go to the PHP downloads page. Click the link under "Complete Source Code" at the top of the page to download the tar.gz (not the tar.bz2 ) version of the file. You'll be directed to a page where you can download the actual file from a mirror closest to you.
2. After you've downloaded the file, uncompress it and extract all of the individual files in the archive with this command:
   
   % gunzip < php-4.3.0.tar.gz | tar xvf -
3. Then, change into the directory where the extracted files are:
   
   % cd php-4.3.0
4. Like Apache, you need to configure the compilation settings in PHP with the configure script. You can see all the configuration options with the --help script:
   
   % ./configure --help
5. To compile successfully as an Apache module, PHP needs a tool from Apache called the apxs utility. If you compiled Apache from source, then you already have the apxs utility. If you installed Apache with apt-get, then you need to install another package, apache-dev, to provide apxs to PHP:
   
   # apt-get install apache-dev
6. To configure PHP to work with Apache, you need to use the --with-apxs option. Additionally, PHP needs to be told to include MySQL support:
   
   % ./configure --with-apxs --with-mysql
7. PHP has lots of other modules that can parse XML, encrypt, and decrypt data, generate graphics or PDF files, and all sorts of other wonders. To enable these other modules, include the appropriate options to configure. Some modules require external libraries to be installed. You can use Debian's dselect tool to find and install the packages that contain these additional libraries.
   
   After configure runs, type make to compile PHP:
   
   % make
8. Then, while you are logged in as root, type make install to install PHP:
   
   # make install
9. The make install script in PHP does a number of things. Aside from copying the PHP Apache module to the right directory, it also installs a command-line ("CLI") PHP binary in this directory: /usr/local/bin/php. Additionally, it installs some of the PEAR library in this directory: /usr/local/lib/php. PEAR is the PHP Extension and Application Repository, a collection of high quality reusable PHP components.
10. After PHP is installed, you still need to edit the Apache configuration file to tell it which files should be parsed by PHP. If you've installed the Debian Apache package, Apache's configuration file, httpd.conf, is located here: /etc/apache/httpd.conf . If you've built Apache from the source, then the location of httpd.conf varies. If you specified a prefix of /usr/local/apache when configuring Apache, then the file is located here: /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf.
    
    Once you've located the httpd.conf file, find this line:
    
    #AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
    
    Note: If you installed Apache using the Debian packages, this line will automatically exist in the httpd.conf file. If you installed Apache from the source, then you'll need to add this line into the httpd.conf file manually.
    
11. Remove the # at the beginning of the line and save the file. This change notifies Apache to make the PHP engine parse all files that end with the extension .php.
12. Now restart Apache to have the new PHP-aware configuration take effect, by typing the following:
    
    # apachectl restart

1. First, create a file in your web server document root called info.php. Add the following line:
   
   <?php phpinfo(); ?>
2. Your web server document root is the directory after the DocumentRoot directive in the Apache httpd.conf file. For example, if httpd.conf contains the line:
   
   DocumentRoot /var/www
   
   Then you should create info.php in this location: /var/www/info.php. Bring up the page with the lynx script:
   
   % lynx http://localhost/info.php
3. You should see a screen of information about your PHP configuration. If you don't see anything, press \ in Lynx to view the document source. If the document source contains the PHP source code (<?php phpinfo(); ?> ), then Apache hasn't been configured properly to hand off .php pages to the PHP engine. If this occurs, make sure you uncommented the proper AddType line in httpd.conf and successfully restarted the server.
   
   If you get an error message stating that info.php was not found, make sure you created the file in the correct DocumentRoot directory. Also, be sure that you performed the "save file" command in your editor, to ensure that you actually saved the file to disk.

1. First, create a table to hold the messages. Run the mysql command-line utility with the database, username, and password you created earlier:
   
   % mysql mydb -umyuser -pmypassword
2. Then, at the mysql> prompt, type the following SQL code to create a table:
   
   CREATE TABLE messages (
 id int unsigned not null auto_increment primary key,
 name varchar(255),
 email varchar(255),
 message mediumtext
);
3. This creates a table with four columns:
   • id: a numerical index that will be unique for each message
   • name: a text field to hold the submitted name
   • email: a text field to hold the submitted email address
   • message: a larger text field for the message body
4. Next, the feedback form page needs to be modified to save the information in the database instead of sending an e-mail message. Here's the new version:

   <?php
if (isset($_REQUEST['submit'])) {
  mysql_connect('localhost','myuser','mypassword');
  mysql_select_db('mydb');
  mysql_query("INSERT INTO messages (name,email,message) VALUES ('" .
    $_REQUEST['name'] ."','" . $_REQUEST['email'] . "','" .
    $_REQUEST['message'] . "')");
  print "Thank you for the feedback.";
} else {
  print<<<_HTML_
<form method="POST" action="$_SERVER[PHP_SELF]">
<table>
  <tr><td>Name:</td><td><input type="text" name="name"></td></tr>
  <tr><td>Email:</td><td><input type="text" name="email"></td></tr>
  <tr><td>Message:</td><td><textarea name="message"></textarea></td></tr>
  <tr><td colspan="2"><input name="submit" type="submit"></td></tr>
</form>
_HTML_;
}
?>

5. The code for printing the form is the same, but instead of constructing an e-mail message, this program connects to MySQL with mysql_connect(), selects a database with mysql_select_db(), and issues a query with mysql_query(). The three arguments to mysql_connect() are the host to connect to and the username and password to connect with. The argument to mysql_select_db()represents the database to use. These are the database, user, and password you created earlier with mysqladmin and the GRANT command.
   
   In practice, you should always check if each of these MySQL functions returns an error or not, but that error checking has been left out of this example, for simplicity.
6. You can use the same MySQL functions to create a companion page to print out all the feedback in the messages table:
   
   <?php

mysql_connect('localhost','myuser','mypassword');
mysql_select_db('mydb');
$r = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM messages');

if (mysql_num_rows($r)) {
  print '<table border="1">';
  print '<tr><th>Name</th><th>Email</th><th>Message</th></tr>';
  while ($ar = mysql_fetch_array($r,MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
    $name = htmlspecialchars(strip_tags($ar['name']));
    $email = htmlspecialchars(strip_tags($ar['email']));
    $message = htmlspecialchars(strip_tags($ar['message']));
    print "<tr><td>$name</td><td>$email</td><td>$message</td></tr>\n";
  }
} else {
  print 'No messages.';
}

?>
7. The same functions are used to connect to the database and issue a query. This time, however, instead of an INSERT query to put data into the table, the script uses a SELECT query to retrieve all the data in the messages table. If there are rows to display, a table header is printed out. Then, mysql_fetch_array() retrieves each row into an associative array, one at a time. Each value to be printed is processed with strip_tags() to remove HTML tags and htmlspecialchars() to turn HTML entities (like &) into their entity-encoded equivalents (like & ). Using strip_tags() and htmlspecialchars() is important to protect against cross-site scripting attacks.
   
   

1. Once your site is set up, create a new file in the site by selecting "Site" in the Site tab of the Files panel and pressing Ctrl+Shift+N.
   
   Rename your new file from untitled.php to something meaningful. Double-click the filename to open your new file.
2. Now it's time to set up a database connection. Click the "Databases" tab of the Application panel and then the button with the "+" on it.
   
   In the MySQL Connection dialog box that pops up, fill in the text boxes with the appropriate information. Your database server's host name (localhost in our examples above) is entered in the "MySQL Server" box. The user name and password ( myuser and mypassword ) is entered in the User Name and Password boxes. The database name ( mydb ) is entered in the "Database" box.

It's OK to use localhost as the host name because the code to connect to the database runs on your server, not on the desktop computer that you're using to run Dreamweaver. Click the "Test" button in the dialog box to make sure that the information you've entered works correctly.

3. After you've created a database connection, you can use that connection to easily populate pages with dynamic data. To create a page that displays all the records in the messages table we used above, we first need to create a Recordset.
   
   A Recordset is a collection of data that results from a database query. To create a Recordset, go to the "Server Behaviors" tab of the Applications panel and click on the button with the "+" on it. From the list of choices that appears, pick Recordset.

4. In the Recordset dialog box that appears, enter a name for the new Recordset, such as "Messages". Select the database connection you created from the Connection drop-down box and the messages table from the Table drop-down box.
   
   The Columns, Filter, and Sort sections of the dialog box let you select which columns from the table to display and how they should be sorted. For this example, let's just display the name, email, and message columns. First, click the "Selected" radio button and then select name, email, and message from the column list.
   
   To sort the messages in ascending alphabetical order by name, choose name and Ascending in the Sort drop-downs. When you click the "OK" button in the Recordset dialog box, your PHP code is inserted into your new file to access the data in the database.
5. Once the Recordset is created, you can display information from it. Position the cursor just after the <body> tag in your new file. Then, select "Dynamic table" from the "Insert > Application Objects" sub-menu. In the dialog box that appears, choose your newly created Recordset from the Recordset drop-down box and click the "All Records" radio button.

About the author
David Sklar is the co-author of the PHP Cookbook, published by O'Reilly & Associates, an independent technology consultant in New York City, and an instructor at the New School. He was a founder and the Chief Technology Officer of both Student.Com and TVGrid.Com, where he led teams of PHP developers that built multilingual data-driven web applications. He holds a degree in Computer Science from Yale University.