Making Sure PHP is Running

This section is intended primarily for users, but system administrators should follow through this to check PHP is running. Create a page somewhere in your HTML directory on your server, call it something like "info.php3", and put the following in it:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Once you've saved this file, point your web browser at the "info.php3" file on the server. If PHP is installed and functional, you will see a page with more information about your server and PHP than you ever wanted to know. If PHP isn't working, you will probably see the line above appear in your web browser as plain text. Keep in mind that the file extension you use is important: on most servers, if you call the file "info.txt" it won't work because PHP won't look at it, but if you call it "info.php3" it will work (if PHP is working correctly). This is because Apache invokes PHP to interpret files based on extension, and .php3 is the extension it is usually told to invoke PHP on. On my servers, if the file were called "info.html", PHP would run. This is somewhat unusual, the default settings usually used with Apache are such that PHP statements in a .html file don't work.