This is going to get lengthy. In the interests of keeping it under control, I'm going to assume you know what you're doing to a certain extent.

With all the curriculum changes in ICT/Computer Science, our head of ICT wants to start teaching more PHP, which sounds like a grand plan to me (that's where my degree is, so of course I know that PHP is the best of all scripting languages).

I have no real experience in setting up Linux servers for the usual LAMP paradigm, so I thought I'd give it a go on Windows. Turns out, it's pretty damned easy.

I've done all this on a standalone server because I don't want errant scripts and queries dragging down my main intranet server. We had a spare physical server lying around anyway so we figured we may as well get some use out of it while it still ran.

I'm going to go through all the way, from installing Windows to installing MySQL. You don't need the MySQL bit if you don't want; you can still do cleverness with forms with PHP alone (and that's our intention here for KS4).

Setting up Windows Server 2012 (in brief)

Install a server as normal.

Setting up Windows Server 2012 (not quite so brief)

Install Server 2012 Standard. 2008R2 works as well but you may as well use 2012 now it's out. 2008R2 will have variations from this guide.

Do all your updates, set your IP, add to domain, etc. etc.

I always have an OS drive [C:] and a data drive [D:]. I'll be setting user files up on D:, it's probably a good idea to do this too.

Little things to remember:

• In Firewall > Advanced Settings > Inbound & Outbound, allow File and Printer Sharing Echo Request ICMPv4, otherwise you will go insane chasing non-existent network problems when you can't ping your new server.
  
• Allow RDP Connections. You can do this from Server Manager > Local Server.
  
• If you want one user to be able to have multiple sessions (e.g. Administrator), open regedit, browse to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server] and set "fSingleSessionPerUser" to 0
  

From the Server Manager dashboard click Add Roles.

With Role-based or feature-based installation selected, click Next. Click Next again.

Scroll down and select Web Server. Keep clicking next until you get to Role Services. Select CGI inside Application Development. Install all this.

In Server Manager, go to IIS, right click on your server name and choose IIS Manager

Expand your server, expand sites, right click on Default Web Site, go to Manage Websites and choose Advanced Settings

Change the Physical Path to where you will store your user files (e.g. D:\inetpub\wwwroot)

Download the Microsoft Web Platform Installer and install it.

Installing PHP 5.4.9

Once the WPI has installed it should open. Search for PHP, find PHP 5.4.9 in the list. Click the Add button. Click the Install button.

Browse to the PHP install directory (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\5.4) and rename php.ini to php.ini.old. Then find php.ini-development, make a copy and rename the copy php.ini. That will change a load of settings to those more suitable to a development environment, including, importantly, outputting error messages to the browser instead of only to the error file.

Download the WinCache Extension for PHP (it improves PHP performance)

Run that download and extract the files somewhere convenient. There's a readme in there, but in brief:

• copy php_wincache.dll into C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.4\ext
  
• open C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.4\php.ini; at the end of the file, add this to the end of the file: extension=php_wincache.dll
  

(no spaces on that last line, despite what the readme file shows)

Create a new text file called info.php in your web-site root. Inside, write

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

and save it. Open a web browser on the server and go to localhost/info.php; you should see a long page full of fun information about your PHP install, thus proving it's working. There should also be a section headed wincache (about 80% down, just search for it); if so, wincache is installed. If not, read that readme, I didn't have any problems

If you want to send mail from PHP scripts using mail(), open up C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.4\php.ini, search for 'SMTP' and put your mail server address on the relevant line. You can also provide a default from-address with sendmail_from a few lines down.

Granting students access

Firstly, a note on our username structure: we work on year of entry, e.g. our current year 7 are 2012 accounts. The username is in the format jsmith12. You will need to adapt this section to suit your own usernames and domain.

Share your website root folder (e.g. D:\inetpub\wwwroot) with everyone (full access). Change your NTFS permissions down to Everyone: Read

Create some subfolders for your year groups (e.g. I have 2012, 2011, 2010...)

Create a group in AD for your PHP users to belong to. Domain Local works fine, Security group.

Get a CSV file of usernames for students who need access. The header should be "username", such that the file, when opened, just looks like

username
jsmith12
jbloggs12
...

Save this CSV file on one of your domain controllers as C:\Scripts\PHPUsers.csv (you can save it wherever you please, tbh, but that's the location my script assumes)

Drop the following file into that same folder, deleting the .txt extension: SetFolderPermission.ps1.txt (as sourced here; a useful little script, that one)

Save this script in the same place, deleting the .txt extension, then get ready to amend it: php.ps1.txt

You will need to:

• alter the dsquery user to reflect your OU structure
  
• change the dsmod group to reflect the group name you are using, and your OU structure
  
• change the domain prefix for the $user variable
  
• alter the switch case to suit your username pattern
  
• alter the $path variable to reflect the share name of your web server
  

After you've changed the script, you can run it in Powershell and it will - from that original CSV - add the user to the group, create a folder for them in the correct year group subfolder, and grant them full permission on that folder.

We're going to map each user's just-created folder to a drive letter; we'll use the same letter 7 times over and use Item Level Targeting to map correctly (we need to do this because of the year group subfolders)

In Active Directory, create a new GPO on your users or students OU (as appropriate). On the scope tab, under Security Filtering, delete Domain Users and add your PHP User group as created earlier, such that the GPO only applies to the relevant users.

Under User Config > Preferences > Windows Settings > Drive Maps, create a New Mapped Drive.

Action = Update

Location = \\server\share\yearGroup\%username% (e.g. \\phpserver\wwwroot\2012\%username%)

Label = PHP Server, or whatever you want to use.

Use = any spare letter

On the common tab, click the Targeting button

New Item > Security Group

Add your year group Security Group (e.g. all Year 7s here are members of Students - Year 2012).

(If you don't use security groups, you can filter by OU, do a wildcard comparison on the username - presumably you will have some way of distinguishing between users)

Once you've set one drive map up like this, right-click on it, copy, then paste X times and tweak the copies till you have all the relevant year groups covered.

You might also choose to map the root of your share for your IT teachers, so they can easily access everyone's files. Don't forget to modify your NTFS permissions to reflect this.

End Result (PHP Development)

At logon, your students will have a new mapped drive [e.g. P:]. They can drop a PHP file directly into this drive, work on it with Dreamweaver, Notepad, whatever.

They can then access it in a web browser through http://server/year/username/file.php

For example, a Year 7 girl Jodie Smith creates helloWorld.php in her P: drive. As soon as she has saved the file in her editor, she can go to http://php/2012/jsmith12/helloWorld.php and see the results. No need to FTP or compile or anything - as soon as changes are saved in code, they are reflected on a page refresh. Brilliant!

Next time

In Part 2 - How to get MySQL running, administer it, and let kids have access to it, both from a database admin point of view and in their PHP code.