[RESOLVED] PHP only partially working

donglass

I am new to PHP, and struggling with trying to get it to work after installation. I installed it on Ubuntu Linux along with Apache 2.2.17 & current version of MySQL. My document root is at /var/www, and I have my test .php, .htm, & .jpg files in it. After starting Apache, and entering http://localhost/ in my Firefox browser, I get 'Index of /', and an alphabetical listing of my test files below that. The only test files that work is a .php and a .htm file that have the following PHP command in them:

<?php
print_r (phpinfo());
?>

The .htm file just has the basic HTML commands before and after the PHP command. They both display detailed information about the PHP version installed on my PC. However, I have test files that have <?php, then the print "test text" or echo "test text" PHP commands in them, and then the '?>, and display nothing in my browser when I put them in my browser, i.e. http:/localhost/filename.php or http:/localhost/filename.htm. Initially I could only get the phpinfo() .php test file to work when the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/httpd.conf file had 'AddType application/x-httpd-php .php' in it. Then I changed it to 'AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html .jpg .jpeg' and I got the phpinfo() .htm test file to display the same as the phpinfo() .php test file. I have run out of ideas, and hope an experienced PHP developer can help me. Thanks.

Don G

bradgrafelman

Can you show us the exact contents of a PHP script that you tried that isn't working?

Also, why on earth do you have .jpg and .jpeg in the PHP AddType declaration?!

donglass

I figured out why it wasn't working a few minutes ago, and the solution was very surprising. I was doing some research to try to understand and resolve the problem when I landed on a website that had some simple PHP code. I created a new file in gedit and copied and pasted the code into my new file, and then saved it to my document root folder. Then I tried to run it, and worked instantly! Then I realized the cause of the problem. The code I was using was from a CD that I got from my Apache, MySQL, & PHP book. When I tried to copy those files from the CD on Linux, I couldn't because I never was able to find a device driver for my DVD writer in Linux. So I went and copied the PHP test files in Windows, logged back into Linux, and copied them from my Windows drive to my document root folder (/var/www). The .php test files that weren't working were those aforementioned files from the CD that I had copied to a Windows folder. I can only surmise that that copying process created some non-displayable characters that prevented PHP from working in Linux. I remember that I created the test phpinfo() file new in Linux, and it was the only one that worked because it wasn't originally from the CD. I have created a few more test files by copying and pasting while in Linux, and they worked fine. What a difficult, memorable, and valuable lesson this has been for me, for it has cost me a lot of time and frustration.

I added .jpg and .jpeg files to my AddType declaration because I will be using a .jpg picture in my website, and wanted to be sure that they would display. From your response, that must have been a bad conclusion, but I am new at this. I'm sure I will make a lot of mistakes in the learning process. I'm having trouble getting my picture to display on my test website. All of the other HTML code is working as it should. The code I am using for my picture file is '<img src="/var/www/COH_BookCover.jpg" align=right border=5 width=450 height=570>', and is after a <hr>, and before a <p> (paragraph). I will close this case as resolved when that is working as it should.

Don G

bradgrafelman

Two major problems that are apparent after your last post:

The AddType line is telling Apache which file extensions should cause the PHP interpreter to be invoked instead of simply sending the files verbatim back to the requesting client. This is good for .php files, because we don't want Apache to send them the plain .php file with your PHP code in it - we want the PHP interpreter to process that file and relay its output back to the requesting client. This is not so for binary JPEG files.
You seem to be constantly confusing directory paths with URLs. The "path" portion of a URL has no direct correlation to the underlying physical directory structure. In other words, you might see "phpbuilder.com/board/showhread.php" in your address bar right now, but I can almost guarantee you (e.g. with 99.99% certainty) that the server(s) hosting PHPBuilder don't have a "board" folder in the root of their hard drive. In fact, there needn't be a "board" folder anywhere (e.g. if mod_rewrite is used).

The folder "/var/www/" is called Apache's document root for a reason - all URL paths are rooted in that folder. In other words, the "root" of your site (simply "mysite.com/" with nothing after the first and only '/') is physically located in "/var/www/". Otherwise, "mysite.com/" would take your visitors to the root of your server's hard drive (which is probably not a good thing).

donglass

I appreciate all your comments that show that you are trying to help me learn this, and I have learned much from this experience. I have taken the .jpg and .jpeg extensions out of the httpd.conf file. Although I sincerely thought this was a PHP problem, I have come to the conclusion that this was a problem of me inadvertently sending files to Apache that could not be processed by Apache. A conclusion I have made is that when Apache cannot process the incoming file, it sends nothing as a default, and when PHP tries to process nothing, a blank screen is produced, which is what I was getting. The test file I last tried in the last message (as I realized after I had sent the last reply) was an HTML file with no PHP code in it. As I mentioned before, the HTML code did what it was supposed to do, but I got no picture. Shortly afterwards, I double-clicked on that file from the Nautilis file manager, and both the HTML output and the picture were produced in my browser. Since PHP was not involved in the execution of this test file, the only conclusion to be made is that Apache was unable to process the picture file. It would not even work after I converted the .jpg picture file to a .odg (Open Office Draw) picture file. So I must now figure out how to make that work, even if it is in a test environment. I must figure out how to produce the picture along with the HTML output before I begin the PHP coding to set up my online store.

I will await a response from you before closing this case. Thanks.

Don G

bradgrafelman

donglass wrote:
I have come to the conclusion that this was a problem of me inadvertently sending files to Apache that could not be processed by Apache

Er, no, the problem was with the image path - it began with "/var/www/" which it should not have (as I explained).

donglass wrote:
A conclusion I have made is that when Apache cannot process the incoming file, it sends nothing as a default, and when PHP tries to process nothing, a blank screen is produced, which is what I was getting.

Not at all - Apache is able to "process" image files just fine; it reads the binary data and invokes the PHP parser with it. The PHP parser, however, will hopefully never find a '<?' or '<?php' equivalent sequence in that binary data and thus simply pass it along unchanged.

However, since you weren't using a valid URL, the 404 errors prevented all of this from ever happening in the first place.

donglass wrote:
As I mentioned before, the HTML code did what it was supposed to do, but I got no picture. Shortly afterwards, I double-clicked on that file from the Nautilis file manager, and both the HTML output and the picture were produced in my browser.

And that should make perfect sense, because the path you gave for the images wasn't a valid URL but instead a local file path. Thus, when you loaded the HTML page locally from your hard drive, your browser understood "/var/www" to be a local file path and not a URL (e.g. http://localhost/var/www, which I'm betting doesn't exist).

donglass wrote:
I must figure out how to produce the picture along with the HTML output before I begin the PHP coding to set up my online store.

See my previous post about confusing local file paths with web URLs.