PHP and IIS: Running PHP under Fast CGI and Url Rewriting

Posted by RobBagby on June 25, 2009 Leave a Comment

Introduction
You can run PHP (as well as other CGI apps) on IIS7 with high performance and reliability thanks to FastCGI.
CGI is a protocol that defines how web servers launch an executable resulting from a request, pass it
arguments and return the dynamic response. You have been able to host CGI applications in IIS in the past,
however there have been challenges prior to FastCGI. As it turns out, the challenge is that there are certain
modules (in PHP, for instance) that are not thread safe. For that reason, IIS traditionally spun up a new
process for each request. This provided the reliability necessary in the face of non-thread-safe modules.
However, the performance suffered due to the cost of spinning up all of these processes. Enter FastCGI. It
guarantees that each process will handle 1 request at a time (providing the reliability), but it allows for process
reuse by maintaining a pool of processes.
While installing PHP on IIS7 wasnt overly complex in the past (see this article if you want the details) we now
have the Web Platform Installer that makes installing FastCGI, PHP and much much more a breeze.
Now, just because you can host PHP on IIS with reliability and high performance, it doesnt necessarily mean
you should. You need some reasons, right? Well, in this post, I will illustrate how to install PHP and FastCGI
on IIS7 easily and illustrate one of many reasons you will want to: The UrlRewrite Module. This module allows
you to easily create SEO-friendly Uris for your application. Lets get to it.

PHP Interop Series

This is part of a small series of blog posts and screencasts that I am doing on interoperability between PHP
and the Microsoft stack. My goal is to illustrate some features of the MS stack that PHP developers can take
advantage of, as well as to illustrate how it is done.

Screencasts
You can see screencasts on YouTube of the topics in this post here:

Installing PHP and FastCGI on IIS7 in under 5 minutes

Create SEO-Friendly URLs with the IIS7 UrlRewrite Module

Set Up a Test Environment (optional)

You can test all of this on Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008. We have made it pretty easy for you to
to set up a virtual environment for testing. You can click here to download Windows Server 2008 Evaluation
Virtual Hard Drive Images. Although it says Virtual Server 2005 is required, the VHD works on Virtual PC
2007, as well. You simply need to download the WS08_RTM_x86_EnterpriseVHD.exe or, if you want smaller
downloads the WS08_RTM_x86_Enterprise.part01.exe and all of the subsequent rar files. You will also need
the WS08_ServerCore86_EnterpriseVHD.exe. You simply uncompress these and register the VHD with
Virtual PC or Virtual Server. That is exactly what I did.

Install the Web Platform Installer

1.

Navigate to http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx and click the download link to

Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta

2.

Click Run (If you get a security warning, click run again)

3.

The Web Platform Installer is now installed. You will see the UI, where you can choose items to
install. Feel free to close this. You can re-open it at any time.

Install PHP, FastCGI and the URLRewrite Module

1.

Open the Web Platform Installer 2 Beta (if you closed it)

2.

Under Web Platform, choose Web Server. Select the following items to install

Static Content

URL Rewrite

CGI

3.
o

Under Web Platform, Choose Frameworks and Runtimes. Select the following item to install
PHP 5.2.9-2

4.

Click Install

5.

Click I Accept if you accept the license terms and conditions

6.

That is it! PHP is installed and FastCGI is configured for you.

Test a PHP Sample Application

I have a very simple PHP application that you can use to test your install (as well as the rewrites later). You
can download it here. If you have your own application feel free to use it. Here are the steps I used to setup
my test environment on my Windows Server 2008 VHD:
1.

Create a directory called Demos

2.

Download the sample application from the link above

3.

Copied the TestPHP directory under my new demos directory. (if you cannot seem to copy in your
virtual hard disk, make sure you may need to install the virtual pc additions)

4.

Register the virtual directory in IIS

Open IIS

Right-Click on your web and choose Add Virtual Directory

Set the Alias to TestPHP and the Path to C:\Demos\TestPHP

Open a browser and navigate to: http://localhost/TestPHP/catalog.php. You should see

something like this:

To prove to yourself that php is actually running and configured, navigate

tohttp://localhost/TestPHP/contactus.php. Take a look at the code and you will see the line of code that
adds the header Contact Us:
<?php echo "Contact Us" ?>
You can also navigate to http://localhost/TestPHP/index.php. It will echo the results of phpinfo().

Add some UrlRewrite Rules

Remember that we have already installed the UrlRewrite 1.1 Module with the Web Platform Installer. Lets use
this module so we can create some friendly URLs for our PHP Application. We do this by adding rewrite rules.
Im going to show you a feature that is new to version 1.1 called Rewrite Maps. It acts just like it sounds. It

allows you to define simple rewrite maps (your basic from > to mapping). I would guess that this will be used
pretty commonly when creating search-engine-friendly URLs. Lets take a look.
1.

Open up IIS and click on your default web site. Then double-click on Url Rewrite

2.

Now we want to create our map. Click on the View Rewrite Maps link on the right side.

3.

Click Add Rewrite Map

4.

Click Add Mapping Entry

5.

Remembering that Virtual Directory name was TestPHP and our catalog page was called
catalog.php. The URL to our page is: http://localhost/TestPHP/catalog.php. We also had a page called
contactus.php (Urlhttp://localhost/TestPHP/contactus.php). These are pretty ugly Urls. The extension
php means nothing to the general public. Perhaps we want the Urls to look more
like http://localhost/catalog and http://localhost/contact. Lets add the following 2 rules:

6.

Now we need to add the rewrite rule that uses the map. Click Add Rules

7.

Choose Rule with rewrite map

8.

Leave the rule action set to Rewrite. Under the Choose the rewrite map section, choose the map
you created earlier. Mine was named PHPTestMap. Click OK

Test It
Now we can type in our friendly URI into the address bar of our browser. Nice.

Conclusion
As you can see, the Web Platform Installer makes configuring PHP to run on IIS a simple task. You can also
see the power of the IIS pipeline. There are a wide array of modules like the UrlRewrite module that you can
take advantage of.