PHP pages does not display in IIS 6 with Windows 2003

By: Ejay Hire in PHP Tutorials on 2011-03-26

I could not get PHP pages to display in IIS 6 with Windows 2003, using the default install of the stable binaries from php.net.

Here is the solution I found.

The default install registers the .php extension as belonging to c:\php\php.exe. This is correct, but it's faster to use the ISAPI extension.

To do this,
1. Open the IIS Management console
2. Expand the server, right click on "Web Sites" and click Properties
3. Open the "ISAPI Filters" foldertab
4. Click Add
5. Enter PHP in the Filter Name box.
6. Click Browse and then Browse to your php4isapi.dll.
6. Click ok -> Apply -> ok

... Once this is completed, your PHP scripts still won't run. The problem
is that you have to define and enable PHP as a "Web Service Extension".

To do this,
1. Open the IIS Management console
2. Expand the server, and expand the "Web Services Extensions"
3. Click "Add a new Web services Extension"
4. Enter PHP in the Extension Name box.
5. In the required files box, Browse to your php directory and add
php4isapi.dll.
6. Click ok -> Apply -> ok

Last but not least, You may or may not need to do the following, -Set the extensions path in the php.ini file if you are going to use any extensions , i.e. php_mssql.dll
-I had to copy the php4isapi.dll from c:\php\isapi to c:\php, YMMV
-Give the webserver user (IUSR_MACHINENAME in most cases) read and execute
access to php4isapi.dll and php4ts.dll