Web Development General

Since PHP version 8 has been released recently and you as a developer want to put your hands on to the exiting journey of PHP version 8, you must be wondering how to upgrade to PHP 8 in WAMP server. This article with a YouTube video will guide you to update WAMP server to PHP version 8.

As you can understand, You can use PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8 in a single WAMP installation. Also you can use multiple version of PHP of same release like PHP 7.2 and PHP 7.4 within the same WAMP server installation. This is a nice way to work on multiple PHP version and you just have to select the needed PHP version in WAMP.

CodeIgniter (CI) is a fantastic MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework for PHP web app development. Many people use it for personal or professional projects. In this blog, I will discuss few tips to setup the configuration for your project.

1.) Setting up environment:

 It is very important to set the ENVIRONMENT variable in index.php file. You first develop, test and then move your application to Production. Depending on these phases, your project needs different configurations like API key, payment gateway key etc. For example, when you develop or test your app, you need to connect to the payment gateway’s sandbox instance with the sandbox’s credentials and when you are ready for prod, you connect to the payment gateway’s production instance with real credentials.

How to setup the environment properly? Open the index.php and search for the text:

define('ENVIRONMENT', isset($_SERVER['CI_ENV']) ? $_SERVER['CI_ENV'] : 'development');

This will set the environment depending on the environment variable CI_ENV set in the .htaccess file. Open the .htaccess file and put the below line of code for Apache:

Being a PHP developer you want to configure PHP 7 on your localhost for various reasons. You might want to explore the new features of PHP 7 or you might be upgrading your existing website to PHP 7 and want to test in your local machine first or you might be creating a brand new project on PHP 7. This blog will help you to configure PHP 7 for WAMP server in localhost.

(Note: You first check with your hosting server about PHP 7 is available or not. If yes, what version of PHP 7 is available.)

Very first thing to know is PHP 7 requires minimum Apache 2.4.x and also it needs WAMP Server 2.5. If you already have WAMP 2.5, ou do not have to uninstall anything. You can configure PHP 7 with WAMP 2.5. How to check your WAMP server version? Right click on the WAMP icon on your windows taskbar and click About… It will show your current WAMP version.