WhyInstalling the PHP module for Apache, including support for IPv6. Additional extensions will be installed and configured.

See also
Build information

Ensure the following options:

lang/php83
[x] CGI           Build CGI version
[x] CLI           Build CLI version
[ ] DEBUG         Build with debugging support
[x] DTRACE        Build with DTrace probes
[x] EMBED         Build embedded library
[x] FPM           Build FPM version
[x] IPV6          IPv6 protocol support
[x] LINKTHR       Link thread lib (for threaded extensions)
[x] MYSQLND       Build with MySQL Native Driver
[ ] NOASLR        Disable ASLR support
[x] PCRE          Use system pcre instead of bundled one
[ ] PHPDBG        Interactive PHP debugger
[x] ZTS           Force Zend Thread Safety (ZTS) build
lang/php83-extensions
[x] BCMATH        bc style precision math functions
[ ] BZ2           bzip2 library support
[ ] CALENDAR      calendar conversion support
[x] CTYPE         ctype functions
[x] CURL          CURL support
[ ] DBA           dba support
[x] DOM           DOM support
[ ] ENCHANT       Enchant spelling support
[x] EXIF          EXIF support
[ ] FFI           Foreign Function Interface support
[x] FILEINFO      fileinfo support
[x] FILTER        input filter support
[x] FTP           FTP support
[x] GD            GD library support
[ ] GETTEXT       gettext library support
[x] GMP           GNU MP support
[x] ICONV         iconv support
[x] IMAP          IMAP support
[x] INTL          Internationalization(ICU)
[x] LDAP          OpenLDAP support
[x] MBSTRING      multibyte string support
[x] MYSQLI        MySQLi database support
[ ] ODBC          ODBC support
[x] OPCACHE       OPcache support
[ ] PCNTL         pcntl support (CLI only)
[x] PDO           PHP Data Objects Interface (PDO)
[ ] PDO_DBLIB     PDO DBLIB-DB driver
[ ] PDO_FIREBIRD  PDO Firebird driver
[x] PDO_MYSQL     PDO MySQL driver
[ ] PDO_ODBC      PDO ODBC driver
[ ] PDO_PGSQL     PDO PostgreSQL driver
[x] PDO_SQLITE    PDO sqlite driver
[ ] PGSQL         PostgreSQL database support
[x] PHAR          phar support
[x] POSIX         POSIX-like functions
[ ] PSPELL        pspell support
[x] READLINE      readline support (CLI only)
[x] SESSION       session support
[ ] SHMOP         shmop support
[x] SIMPLEXML     simplexml support
[ ] SNMP          SNMP support
[ ] SOAP          SOAP support
[ ] SOCKETS       sockets support
[x] SODIUM        Sodium encryption support
[x] SQLITE3       sqlite3 support
[ ] SYSVMSG       System V message support
[ ] SYSVSEM       System V semaphore support
[ ] SYSVSHM       System V shared memory support
[ ] TIDY          TIDY support
[x] TOKENIZER     tokenizer support
[x] XML           XML support
[x] XMLREADER     XMLReader support
[x] XMLWRITER     XMLWriter support
[x] XSL           XSL support (Implies DOM)
[ ] ZIP           ZIP support
[x] ZLIB          ZLIB support

Configuration

The main configuration file is /usr/local/etc/php.ini, it is also possible to define most of the values in the Apache configuration using directives: php_flag, php_value, php_admin_flag and php_admin_value.

php.ini

Interpreter

PHP will not use the short form (ie: <?) as it conflicts with processing instructions for XML documents.

short_open_tag      = Off
Error handling

For a production system, errors and warnings will not be saved as they can be particularly numerous even if the code is functional.

display_errors      = Off
Memory

Limit memory usage to 20MB per web request.

memory_limit        = 20M
Files

Sending files is allowed, but limited to 2MB per file, the value of post_max_size is also involved in sending file because the transfer is done by the POST.

file_uploads        = On
upload_max_filesize = 2M
Timezone

For the correct operation of a number of applications, it is advisable to set the time zone. By default we choose UTC as it is the international basis of civil time adopted by most countries worldwide.

date.timezone       = UTC

Module loading

The main Apache configuration is located in the /usr/local/etc/apache24/ directory, for PHP it is essentially made of the module loading and the association of the PHP engine with *.php and *.phps files.

LoadModule php_module                   libexec/apache24/libphp.so

<IfModule php_module>
    AddType application/x-httpd-php        .php
    AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps
</IfModule>

The module lost its version number in PHP 8: it registers as php_module and installs as libphp.so, where PHP 7 had php7_module and libphp7.so. It also moved out of the language port into one of its own — www/mod_php83 and its siblings — so selecting an option in lang/php83 no longer produces it. application/x-httpd-php-source is unchanged and still registered by the module.

It can be decided to not create the Includes/php.conf file. In that case, it will only be required to add the corresponding line in the website configuration, if it need to run PHP. The line to be added being:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

Per-site directives

In case of PHP use, we wish to have the index file for directories to be processed by PHP. To achieve this we must specify the processing order of index files.

DirectoryIndex      index.php index.html

Thereafter special directives in PHP can be used to change the values of various configuration elements, some will allow overloading using the .htaccess file, others do not. They are listed below:

PHP directives in apache
  Overloadable Not overloadable
Value php_value php_admin_value
Flag php_flag php_admin_flag

A configuration example, among others, is:

php_value error_log /web/www.example.com/log/php.log
php_value           default_mimetype 'text/html; charset=utf-8'
php_value           memory_limit            36M
php_value           session.save_path       /web/www.example.com/session/
php_value           open_basedir            /web/www.example.com/content/
php_admin_flag      display_errors          off
php_admin_flag      file_uploads            off