PHP is available for multiple operating systems and platforms. Therefore, we recommend you consult the PHP documentation to find the environment similar to the one you will be using and follow the setup instructions accordingly.
Time and again, you may also want to change the way you configure PHP. To do this, the PHP configuration file has to be changed and requires you to restart your web (Apache) server. Every time the PHP environment is changed, you will have to restart the web (Apache) server to ensure the changes take effect.
The configuration settings of PHP are maintained in a file called php.ini. The behavior of PHP features like session handling and form processing is controlled by the settings in this file. The php.ini options are referred to in later chapters, but generally, the code in this book does not need a customized configuration. You can refer to PHP documentation to know more about configuring php.ini.