FastCGI Archives - Page 2 of 2

FastCGI Extension 1.5 for IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.1 – RC

Today IIS team has released the FastCGI Extension 1.5 for IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.1 – Release Candidate. This version is based on FastCGI Extension 1.0 and it adds several important improvements and features. The release is believed to have a quality level suitable for production deployments.

Install the Release Candidate of FastCGI Extension 1.5 for IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.1

Install FastCGI 1.5 RC with Web Platform Installer

or, download:

Upgrade from FastCGI Extension 1.0 and 1.5 Beta releases

If you already have installed FastCGI Extension v1.0 or FastCGI Extesnion v1.5 Beta, then the installation package will upgrade it to version 1.5 – RC. All the related IIS configuration and settings in fcgiext.ini file will be preserved during upgrade. Note that during upgrade from v1.0 the comments in fcgiext.ini will not be updated and will not mention new configuration settings. However the new settings can still be used after upgrade.

FastCGI Extension 1.5 for IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.1 – Beta

Today IIS team has released the FastCGI Extension 1.5 for IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.1 – Beta. This version is based on FastCGI Extension 1.0 and it adds several important improvements and features.

Install the Beta of FastCGI Extension 1.5 for IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.1

or, download:

Upgrade from FastCGI Extension 1.0 release

If you already have FastCGI Extension version 1.0 installed then the installation package will upgrade it to version 1.5. All the related IIS configuration and settings in fcgiext.ini file will be preserved during upgrade. Note that during upgrade the comments in fcgiext.ini will not be updated and will not mention new configuration settings. However the new settings can still be used after upgrade.

Install PHP with Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0

While the task of setting up PHP on IIS was not a difficult one, it anyway required a lot of manual installation and configuration steps. With the PHP 5.2.9-1 release the PHP development community has put a lot of improvements to the PHP installer to make it easy to setup PHP on IIS 5.1, IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0. The latest PHP installer can be downloaded from the PHP community site.

Now, with the release of Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta (Web PI), the task of enabling PHP on Windows OS has become the easiest it has ever been. Here are the three simple steps you need to follow:

Windows Installer for PHP 5.2.9 RC and PHP 5.3 Beta

I am pleased to let everyone know that PHP development community has made significant improvements to the installer in upcoming PHP releases. In particular a number of bugs have been fixed to make the installer work well with FastCGI extension in IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0 and with FastCGI module in IIS 7.0. Now the installer will do for you many of the configuration steps that previously you had to complete manually by following the instructions in the article Using FastCGI to Host PHP Applications on IIS 7.0. Specifically, the installer will:

Unpack PHP core files and extensions
Make changes to the php.ini to enable necessary extensions and specify correct extension path
Create and configure a new FastCGI process pool for PHP executable
Create a script or handler mapping for *.php extension.

Download the PHP installer for non-thread-safe build of PHP from this location:

Major revision of FastCGI/PHP article on IIS.NET

Since the time we have published the article about installing FastCGI and PHP on IIS 7.0 it has become one of the most popular articles on http://learn.iis.net. Also it has received a lot of comments from site visitors. Today, we are publishing the updated version of this article that contains more up-to-date information and addresses most of the feedback from community. Here is what this article includes now:

Please take a look at the new content and leave comments if you have any questions of feedback.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank IIS.NET visitors who have provided their comments and corrections to this article. Also I thank Jake and Bill for doing a final review of the article.

Update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module

IIS team has recently released an update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module that fixes compatibility problems with several popular PHP applications. In particular, the update changes the behavior of FastCGI module in the following ways:

REQUEST_URI server variable set by FastCGI module now includes query string and path info. Previously, lack of the query string in this server variable caused the popular CMS application Drupal to not work with FastCGI on IIS 7.0
REQUEST_URI server variable now contains the originally requested URL path before any URL rewriting was performed. Prior to this fix, the server variable used to contain a final rewritten URL, which caused problems when using URL rewriting to enable “pretty permalinks” for popular blog engine WordPress.

Note that above mentioned problems do not exist in IIS 6.0 FastCGI Extension, which always has been setting the REQUEST_URI server variable correctly.

The update is available for download from the following locations:

Warning: if your PHP application was coded in a way so that it relied on the REQUEST_URI server variable to contain the requested URL without a query string or to contain the final rewritten URL, then installing this update may break your application. Before applying the update, please make sure that your application does not rely on incorrect behavior of FastCGI module.

Acknowledgements: I want to thank IIS team members (Anil Ruia, Won Yoo, Yamini Jagadeesan) for providing this update and Zend Technologies team (Stanislav Malyshev) for validating the changes in FastCGI module.

Per-site PHP configuration with IIS FastCGI

There have been a few questions on IIS.NET PHP forum regarding enabling per-site PHP configuration. This is a common requirement when running PHP applications in shared hosting environment, because each PHP application may require a different set of PHP settings. Shared hosting providers often want to provide their customers with an option of controlling PHP configuration if necessary.

Until recently, it was thought that per-site PHP configuration was only possible when running PHP on Apache in *nix based OS. However, with FastCGI module it is possible to enable this for PHP applications hosted on IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0.

The development team at GoDaddy.com has researched and validated several options for enabling per-site PHP configuration on Windows. Based on their findings, we have updated the PHP shared hosting guide with instructions on how to allow per-site php.ini files when running PHP via FastCGI on IIS 7.0. In this post I will explain how to accomplish the same on IIS 6.0 by using FastCGI extension.

Assume we have two web sites in IIS 6.0 – website1.com and website2.com. We want each web site to use its own version of php.ini file. Let’s assume that php.ini for website1.com is located in C:\Inetpub\website1.com folder and php.ini for website2.com is located in C:\Inetpub\website2.com folder.