Drawbacks of PHP-on-IIS?

Question

I work in a dev environment that is currently IIS6/Server 2003 with Framework 3.5. I primarily am working in ASP.NET MVC.

I've run into a scenario where, for the solution I'm working on, I'd either have to spend weeks reinventing the wheel or integrating a PHP-based opensource project into one of the components I'm building.

I'd love to add this project to the fold, but the fact that it is based on PHP greatly concerns because of potential compatibility, security, and administration issues with running both PHP and .NET on a single IIS installation.

What are your experiences of doing this? Good? Bad? Not a big deal? Major headache?

Answer 1

The major issues I hit in the past may not be a problem for you:

• Some PHP libraries assume you can use mod_rewrite. I used ISAPI Rewrite instead, but it was not 100% compatible.
• Some libraries (or developers) assume they will run in a Unix based environment, and the file system will be case sensitive.

Apart from these, I haven't had any issue when running PHP from IIS that would prevent me from using it in a production environment.

Answer 2

Check the dependencies very carefully.

Many OSS php apps were not available to me because they required libs which were *nix only.

Very often its not until you download it and have a good look that it becomes obvious what those dependencies are.

Not sure if your Q hints at running .asp and .php extensions, but yes you can run them alongside - I even once managed to get .htm files that got parsed by as .asp first THEN as .php after ( btw this was old-style .asp not .net - but on IIS all the same ) .