Difference between ....

neville

Hi all....

This may sound a little dumb, but could any one tell me in what way is php as module of apache different from the cgi version of php,
which one is better ? and what are these loaded modules that I see under APACHE when I do a phpinfo on my site

Also could anyone tell me how to find out what extensions are supported by my ISP without askin them ?

Thanks a lot folks

brandonschnell

1) running php as a module means that apache looks for any .php files being requested and hands that off to the module to be processed before being sent out. running php as a dynamic module imho is the way to go.

when running php as a cgi (there are other ways around this) you have to call the cgi & file directly ie: www.yoursite.com/cgi-bin/php.exe?php_file.php. php.exe is a program that gets the file to run and outputs the results using apache. the nice thing (probably the only nice thing) about running php as a cgi is that you can have it run as a different user on the server.

2) look up the module info at www.apache.org

3) what kind of extensions? php files typically end in .php or in php3. other file extensions are handled by the web server. try from the command prompt: "cat /etc/httpd/conf/magic". they'll probably have it protected or in a different location. however if you know what kind of files you want to offer on your page you can force the headers from apache or php if you know the correct mime type.

neville

Hi Brandon,

I have installed PHP in /php directory and in my conf file i have made the entry
"Action application ..... /php/php.exe"

so what kind of php am I running ?

About the file extensions what I meant was what file extensions should I give my php files.... I had written an application with include files and all... having their file extensions as [.phtml] , [.htm] only to later realise that the extension .phtml was not recognized by APACHE on my server ... when I was writing them on my pc they worked because I had made the necessary references in my personal APACHE conf file. However on another project I did not have this problem as that was a different ISP.

So now I want to see what are the extensions supported for php on each ISP that I upload my programs to before I write them to avoid the mess later on.

Thanks for listening to my big story.

Anon

you're probably running php as a cgi.

as to what extension it depends on what version of php the isp is running. Version 3 of php used .php3 and the newer version 4 uses .php as the default php extension. the isp can modify what extensions are recognized of course but .php should be safe.

there isn't a way that i'm aware of that will tell you what other extensions the isp supports besides calling them.