PHP at UT Austin

PHP is installed on Web Central (www.utexas.edu). To use PHP, Web Central publishers should:

1. Put their PHP scripts in their publishing directories. Just like Web pages, you can create PHP scripts on the server or create them on your local PC or MAC and then upload them.
2. Make sure your PHP scripts end with a .php extension
3. PHP scripts need to be world readable, just like Web pages

The version of PHP installed on Web Central has database support for Oracle and MySQL. ITS supports Oracle on the Web Central server but is not currently running MySQL. Publishers wishing to use PHP with MySQL can execute PHP scripts on Web Central, but those scripts will need to connect with another server running MySQL.

Web Central's PHP installation also runs in Safe Mode. Because of the number of publishers on Web Central we have to install PHP with higher security. In Safe Mode:

• files to be read from or written to must have the same ownership of the PHP script being executed, or the directory in which the script resides must be owned by the owner of the PHP script
• PHP scripts cannot execute external system programs

These limitations should not prevent you from doing most of the things you might want to do with PHP, but you should be aware that they exist.