I'm finally making the move to developing in PHP - or at least I must for the time being because of an important project I am working on. To make things easy on myself, I need a familiar development environment -
NetBeans 6.x is just perfect for that. Here's how you set up NetBeans to talk PHP.
- Ensure you don't have previous installations of PHP. Presence of such will confuse the hell out of your new installations.
- Download the Wamp server. This package contains an Apache HTTP web server, MySql database, and the PHP engine, along with some admin utilities and a Wamp server console. Believe me, this stack takes the nightmare out of configuring PHP on Windows.
- Download the PHP plugin for NetBeans: Tools | Plugins -> Available Plugins tab -> Search [php]. Install the PHP scripting plugin, which includes an editor, runtime, and documentation. We probably won't use the runtime that comes with this plugin, as we need to use Wamp and other debug tools that it does not support. NB will need to restart after this install.
After NB returns, test the setup by
creating a simple PHP project:
- File | New Project ... -> PHP | PHP Project [Next] -> (set project properties) [Next].
- Web server configuration: click [Manage] -> Connection name = Wamp2, Local web server with file access [Next].
- Manual configuration [Browse] to %where_you_installed_wamp%\bin\apache\apache2.2.8\conf\httpd.conf for the Apache config file. [Next]
- Http server settings - just change the port number to something no other app is using. I choose 81 on localhost (Remember to update httpd.conf to listen on port 81 as well).
- Finish up and close the dialogs. NB creates a new project and opens index.php for you to edit. You can start wil basic HTML in a .php file. If on running the project you see a good page, all is well.
Note that you won't need to configure the web server every time you create subsequent projects. Also, I'll leave debugging and other configurations to future posts.
