Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 15

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 15 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 15 (LAMP)

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a Fedora 15 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On CentOS 6.0

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a CentOS 6.0 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support.

So far, we have looked at connecting to a MySQL database via Perl and Python. Next, we will look at connecting via PHP. I am assuming that you have already installed PHP or have the ability to run PHP scripts on your server, and that you have MySQL installed as well.

This example will use the same address table from the previous post, Inserting Data into MySQL with Perl.

Here is the SQL statement that we used to create the table:

SET NAMES latin1;
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;

CREATE TABLE `address` (
`name_first` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
`name_last` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
`address_01` varchar(40) NOT NULL,
`address_02` varchar(40) NOT NULL,
`address_city` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
`address_state` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
…

Installing Cherokee With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.04

Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, virtual hosts, authentication, on the fly encoding, load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more. This tutorial shows how you can install Cherokee on an Ubuntu 11.04 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

XKCD (as usual) makes a very good point – this time about password strength, and I reckon it’s something app developers need to consider urgently. Geeks can debate the exact amount of entropy, but that’s not really the issue: insisting on mixed upper/lower and/or non-alpha and/or numerical components to a user password does not really improve security, and definitely makes life more difficult for users.

So basically, the functions that do a “is this a strong password” should seriously reconsider their approach, particularly if they’re used to have the app decide whether to accept the password as “good enough” at all.

Update: Jeff Preshing has written an xkcd password generator. Users probably should choose their own four …

I find myself flying to New York on Monday for some dealnews related business. Anytime I travel I try and find something fun to do at night. (Watching a movie by myself in Provo, Utah was kinda not that fun.) So, this week I asked on Twitter if anything was happening while I would be in town. Anything would do. A meetup of PHP/MySQL users or some design/css/js related stuff for example. Pretty much anything interesting. Well, later that day I received an IM from the brilliant John Allspaw, Senior VP of Technical Operations at Etsy. He wanted me to swing by the Etsy offices and say hi. Turns out it is only a block away from where I would be. Awesome! He also mentioned that he would like to have me come and speak at their offices some time. That would be neat too. I will have to plan better …

Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 5.6

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a CentOS 5.6 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

When I was designing web sites, for a long time I wrote my HTML code the “hard” way – by opening a text editor and manually typing in the code (this was before I purchased Adobe DreamWeaver).

During that time of manual HTML writing, I had a project that required forms on a web page, and I needed a place to store the information. After talking with a few tech friends, I decided to use MySQL as my web site database, and Perl as my scripting language.

I had written complex Bourne shell scripts before, but Perl was something entirely new. With a little help from a buddy of mine, after a few hours I was off and running. I was amazed at how easy it was to connect to a MySQL database with Perl.

This example will show you how to use Perl to connect to a …

I was writing about PHP.next before, many things improved there meanwhile. Most notably we have a committed version number: The next PHP release will be called PHP 5.4. The topic I want to talk about today is "Improved application portability" which covers multiple small changes which aim at making it simpler for developers to write applications working on any PHP setup.

Separating <?= from short_open_tags

PHP knows quite a few ways to separate PHP code from surrounding text (usually HTML), most applications use <?php as that works on every system. There is a short form of this, <?, which can be disabled using php.ini's short_open_tags setting. Being able to disable this is important when embedding PHP code into XML documents containing XML processing instructions. Now we also have …