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Making Zend Framework run under IIS

Richard Knop — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 18:47:04 +0000

PHP is usually used together with Apache web server but sometimes, mainly during development, it is easier to work on a Windows PC with IIS 7. Fortunately, PHP and IIS 7 are friends and it’s easy to set up a Zend Framework project under IIS 7 webs server. I have decided to merge together few of my older posts which dealt with smaller parts of the whole process. This post should cover installation of IIS 7, PHP, configuration of PHP in IIS manager and finally setting up a Zend Framework project. Let’s begin.

First, you need to install PHP. Download it from here and install it with default settings. On Windows 7 default installation path should be:

C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.3

Second, install IIS 7. That’s too easy so I won’t give you step by step instructions.

Third, we need to set handler mappings for PHP in IIS manager. Click on Start, type IIS and open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager:

Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager

In IIS Manager click on Handler Mappings:

Click on Handler Mappings in IIS manager

Click on Add Module Mapping. In Request Path field type “*.php”, choose “FastCgiModule” as Module and type path to your php-cgi.exe file into Executable (Optional) field, in my case “C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.3\php-cgi.exe”. Type “PHP_via_FastCGI” into Name field. Click on OK. The handler mapping should look like this:

PHP Handler Mapping

Next, we need to tell IIS manager to treat index.php files as default opening points for PHP websites. Open command line and execute this command:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config ^ -section:system.webServer/defaultDocument /+"files.[value='index.php']" ^ /commit:apphost

Add index.php as default file to IIS 7

You should have PHP installed and configured correctly in IIS 7 now. As a checkpoint, create a new website with different port than the default one (e.g. 81), add index.php file with some simple echo statement to its root directory and open it in a web browser.

Create a new website and test your configuration with simple index.php

In the case of the image above, the URI of that website would be http://localhost:82/. Open it in your web browser. If everything works fine, we can move on.

Create your usual directory structure for Zend Framework in the root of your newly created website. The only thing left is rewriting URIs. Since IIS 7 does not support .htaccess files we are all used to from Apache environments, you will need to install the URL Rewrite module for IIS.

You can use my Zend blank project to create a quick basic structure for Zend Framework project with already configured index.php and bootstrap files. Just download the zipped file and unzip its contents inside the root directory of your newly created website. In case of this tutorial that would be C:\inetpub\test_website. The only thing you need to edit is the include path in index.php, so it will point to your Zend Framework library folder.

Create a file named web.config in the public directory of your Zend Framework project and put this XML code there:

version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>
.webServer>
>
>
name="Imported Rule 1" stopProcessing="true">
url="^.*$" />
logicalGrouping="MatchAny">
input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" pattern="" ignoreCase="false" />
input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" pattern="" ignoreCase="false" />
>
type="None" />
>
name="Imported Rule 2" stopProcessing="true">
url="^.*$" />
type="Rewrite" url="index.php" />
>
>
>
.webServer>
>

Create web.config file in public directory and put rewrite rules in it

Open your website in the browser and it it should work correctly. In case you used my Zend blank project you should see a page like this:

Hurray! You got Zend Framework working like charm under IIS 7

Final tip. You might have noticed that IIS 7 by default does not show you any PHP application errors. As a developer surely you need to see the errors so you can fix them. Just open your php.ini file, find display_errors directive and set it to On:

Set display_errors directive in php.ini to On

Merge PDF documents with Zend_Pdf

Richard Knop — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:23:25 +0000

Merging two or more PDF files with Zend_Pdf component of the Zend Framework is really simple. You just need to load the documents into Zend_Pdf instances and then iterate over their pages:

// load PDF documents

$pdf1 = Zend_Pdf::load('first.pdf');
$pdf2 = Zend_Pdf::load('second.pdf');
// we will merge our two PDF files into a new Zend_Pdf object
$pdfMerged = new Zend_Pdf();
// add all pages from the first PDF to our new document
foreach($pdf1->pages as $page){
$clonedPage = clone $page;
$pdfMerged->pages[] = $clonedPage;
}
// add all pages from the second PDF to our new document
foreach($pdf2->pages as $page){
$clonedPage = clone $page;
$pdfMerged->pages[] = $clonedPage;
}
unset($clonedPage);
// send the merged PDF document to browser
header('Content-type: application/pdf');
echo $pdfMerged->render();

A little bonus, if you need to load archived PDF documents (as I needed to recently) and merge them, you can use ZipArchive:

$zip = new ZipArchive;
$res = $zip->open('zipped_PDF_File.zip');
$pdf = Zend_Pdf::parse($zip->getFromIndex(0));

Hope somebody finds it useful

Zend Framework rewrite rules for IIS7 web server

Richard Knop — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 22:35:23 +0000

UPDATE: I wrote a new more complete post explaining Zend Framework and IIS 7 configuration steb by step: Making Zend Framework run under IIS

If you are developing on a Windows PC you might want to use the native Windows web server IIS7 to run PHP. I do it that way. Since IIS neither accepts nor understands .htaccess files you will have to use a different approach to set up a Zend Framework project.

You will need to install the URL Rewrite module for IIS. Then just create a file called web.config in the public directory and put the following XML inside:

version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>
.webServer>
>
>
name="Imported Rule 1" stopProcessing="true">
url="^.*$" />
logicalGrouping="MatchAny">
input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" pattern="" ignoreCase="false" />
input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" pattern="" ignoreCase="false" />
>
type="None" />
>
name="Imported Rule 2" stopProcessing="true">
url="^.*$" />
type="Rewrite" url="index.php" />
>
>
>
.webServer>
>

Instead of manually creating the file you can also use the IIS Manager and import the rewrite rules through its interface.

Zend_Logger date() warning

Richard Knop — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 22:22:52 +0000

If you are getting a warning like this when you’re trying to write something to a log file with Zend_Logger:

Warning: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Europe/Paris' for '1.0/no DST' instead in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\zend\library\Zend\Log.php on line 308

The solution is simple. I f you have access to your php.ini configuration file, just look for a line starting with:

date.timezone =

And put your timezone there, for example I used:

date.timezone = "Europe/Paris"

If you cannot edit the php.ini file, use this inside your PHP script:

date_default_timezone_set("Europe/Paris");

Zend_Navigation add class to active link

Richard Knop — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:49:00 +0000

It is often useful to highlight an active navigation menu link so users are clear about where they are. It is usually done by adding a class (for instance: “active”) to a link which points to a current request URI. When using Zend_Navigation it is a bit more complicated. I am using a controller plugin to add the class to the active link during the routeShutdown event:

class My_Controller_Plugin_PrepareNavigation extends Zend_Controller_Plugin_Abstract
{
public function routeShutdown(Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request)
{
$viewRenderer = Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::getExistingHelper('ViewRenderer');
$viewRenderer->initView();
$view = $viewRenderer->view;
$container = new Zend_Navigation(Zend_Registry::get('configuration')->navigation);
foreach ($container->getPages() as $page) {
$uri = $page->getHref();
if ($uri === $request->getRequestUri()) {
$page->setClass('active');
}
}
$view->navigation($container);
}
}

Action helper that converts SQL result to XML

Richard Knop — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:43:09 +0000

Here is a simple Zend Framework controller action helper that converts SQL result to XML. The SQL result should be fetched as an object or an array of objects:

class My_Controller_Action_Helper_SqlToXml extends Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_Abstract
{
public function direct($sqlResult, $rootElementName, $childElementName, $singleRow, $encoding = 'UTF-8')
{
// create XML documnt
$doc = new DomDocument('1.0', $encoding);
// insert a root element
$root = $doc->createElement($rootElementName);
$root = $doc->appendChild($root);
// if the SQL result set contains only a singler row
if (true === $singleRow) {
$xmlData .= $this->rowToXml($doc, $root, $sqlResult, $childElementName);
}
// if the SQL result set is an object array
else if (false === $singleRow) {
foreach ($sqlResult as $row) {
$xmlData .= $this->rowToXml($doc, $root, $row, $childElementName);
}
}
// return XML string
return $doc->saveXML();
}
private function rowToXml($doc, $root, $row, $childElementName)
{
// insert a child element
$occ = $doc->createElement($childElementName);
$occ = $root->appendChild($occ);
// iterate through each public object property and insert a shild element
foreach ($row as $property => $value) {
$child = $doc->createElement($property);
$child = $occ->appendChild($child);
$childValue = $doc->createTextNode($value);
$childValue = $child->appendChild($childValue);
}
}
}

Hope some of you will find it useful.

Zend Framework – MixedCase or ACRONYMCase Survey

Richard Knop — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:18:31 +0000

So Matthew Weier O’Phinney and the rest of the Zend Framework team have started to convert all code to use ACRONYMCase casing. However, they’re not done yet and they have decided to let people decide whether to use MixedCase or ACRONYMCase. If you’d like to have your say in this matter simply visit this website and vote in the survey.

The poll will probably get closed in few days so hurry.

Personally, I have voted for ZF classes to enforce MixedCasing. I find it much more readable than ACRONYMCasing. XmlHttpRequest is prettier and more readable than XMLHTTPRequest, don’t you think?

Zend Framework content negotiation plugin

Richard Knop — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 17:33:41 +0000

Even though most designers write nice and valid XHTML it usually gets served to browser as text/html. In other words, what browser sees is a chaotic tag soup instead of XML (remember that while HTML was based on SGML, XHTML is based on XML or it is a reformulation of HTML in XML). The major reason why XHTML pages are getting served as text/html is infamous Internet Explorer which does not support serving XHTML the correct way (as XML). But why should your website suffer because of one browser? You can serve the tag soup to IE and serve XML to other browsers. This is called content negotiation and I’m going to show you a simple Zend Fraemwork controller plugin that will negotiate different content to different browsers:

class My_Controller_Plugin_NegotiateContent extends Zend_Controller_Plugin_Abstract
{
public function preDispatch(Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request)
{
$viewRenderer = Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::getExistingHelper('ViewRenderer');
$viewRenderer->initView();
$view = $viewRenderer->view;
// content negotiation
header('Vary: Accept');
if (false === stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'application/xhtml+xml')) {
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
$view->doctype('HTML4_STRICT');
$view->headMeta()->appendHttpEquiv('Content-Type', 'text/html; charset=UTF-8');
$view->xhtmlAllowed = false;
} else {
header('Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8');
$view->doctype('XHTML1_STRICT');
$view->headMeta()->appendHttpEquiv('Content-Type', 'application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8');
$view->xhtmlAllowed = true;
}
}
}

This plugin will serve HTML 4.01 Strict as text/html to IE and XHTML 1.0 Strict as application/xhtml+xml to other browsers.

The only thing you need to do is to register the plugin to the front controller during bootstrapping:

$frontController->registerPlugin(new My_Controller_Plugin_NegotiateContent());

And it will take care of content negotiation. The plugin will also set a boolean view variable $view->xhtmlAllowed so you can use different markups in layouts and views if needed ( in HTML and in XHTML).

How to register a new phpBB user with Zend Framework

Richard Knop — Thu, 20 May 2010 21:44:02 +0000

You might need to integrate one of your future Zend Framework applications with phpBB forum software. The most important aspect of such integration is a dual sign up process. In other words, you want to avoid having users sign up at both the application and phpBB forum. The simplest solution is to have a single sign up form in your ZF application which upon submission will register user details in both your application and the phpBB forum. I will show you how to do that assuming both applications are on the same server.

The sign up form should have at least these fields:

email
username
password

// first of all, let's get the submitted form data

$data = $form->getValues();
//
// here you would use the data to register user in the ZF application
//
// once the user has been registered at the application level,
// let's use the same data to register him/her at the phpBB level
$db = Zend_Registry::get('dbAdapter');
$phpbbUserIp = '127.0.0.1';
// if IP is valid include it in the INSERT query
$validator = new Zend_Validate_Ip();
if ($validator->isValid($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'])) {
$phpbbUserIp = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
}
$sql = 'INSERT INTO phpbb_users (
user_type,
group_id,
user_permissions,
username,
username_clean,
user_password,
user_email,
user_email_hash,
user_timezone,
user_lang,
user_ip,
user_regdate,
user_dateformat)
VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)';
$stmt = new Zend_Db_Statement_Pdo($db,
$sql);
$stmt->execute(array(0,
2,
'',
$data['username'],
$data['username'],
$this->_helper->PhpbbHash($data['password']),
$data['email'],
sprintf('%u', crc32(strtolower($data['email']))) . strlen($data['email']),
1.00,
'sk',
$phpbbUserIp,
time(),
'D M d, Y g:i a'));
$stmt = new Zend_Db_Statement_Pdo($db,
'SELECT user_id FROM phpbb_users WHERE user_email = ? LIMIT 1');
$stmt->execute(array($data['email']));
$userId = $stmt->fetchColumn(0);
$stmt = new Zend_Db_Statement_Pdo($db,
'INSERT INTO phpbb_user_group (
group_id,
user_id,
group_leader,
user_pending)
VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?)');
$stmt->execute(array(2, $userId, 0, 0));
$stmt->execute(array(7, $userId, 0, 0))

There are few tiny things you will probably need to modify according to your application. I chose Slovak language (‘sk’) and GMT+1 time zone (’1.00′) which is a time for central Europe. I also used a controller action helper PhpbbHash above. The helper is here:

/**
* PhpbbHash
* Just a phpbb hashing algorithm rewritten in a form of controller action helper.
* The reason for this is because we want users to be registered simultaneously
* at both the main website and the phpbb forum so we will need to add a row to
* phpbb_users table during registration at the main website.
*
* @author PHPBB
*/
class My_Controller_Action_Helper_PhpbbHash extends Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_Abstract
{
public function direct($password)
{
$itoa64 = './0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';
$random_state = '123456789012';
$random = '';
$count = 6;
if (($fh = @fopen('/dev/urandom', 'rb')))
{
$random = fread($fh, $count);
fclose($fh);
}
if (strlen($random) < $count)
{
$random = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < $count; $i += 16)
{
$random_state = md5('123456789012' . $random_state);
$random .= pack('H*', md5($random_state));
}
$random = substr($random, 0, $count);
}
$hash = $this->_hash_crypt_private($password, $this->_hash_gensalt_private($random, $itoa64), $itoa64);
if (strlen($hash) == 34)
{
return $hash;
}
return md5($password);
}
public function _hash_gensalt_private($input, &$itoa64, $iteration_count_log2 = 6)
{
if ($iteration_count_log2 < 4 || $iteration_count_log2 > 31)
{
$iteration_count_log2 = 8;
}
$output = '$H$';
$output .= $itoa64[min($iteration_count_log2 + ((PHP_VERSION >= 5) ? 5 : 3), 30)];
$output .= $this->_hash_encode64($input, 6, $itoa64);
return $output;
}
public function _hash_encode64($input, $count, &$itoa64)
{
$output = '';
$i = 0;
do
{
$value = ord($input[$i++]);
$output .= $itoa64[$value & 0x3f];
if ($i < $count)
{
$value |= ord($input[$i]) << 8;
}
$output .= $itoa64[($value >> 6) & 0x3f];
if ($i++ >= $count)
{
break;
}
if ($i < $count)
{
$value |= ord($input[$i]) << 16;
}
$output .= $itoa64[($value >> 12) & 0x3f];
if ($i++ >= $count)
{
break;
}
$output .= $itoa64[($value >> 18) & 0x3f];
}
while ($i < $count);
return $output;
}
public function _hash_crypt_private($password, $setting, &$itoa64)
{
$output = '*';
// Check for correct hash
if (substr($setting, 0, 3) != '$H$')
{
return $output;
}
$count_log2 = strpos($itoa64, $setting[3]);
if ($count_log2 < 7 || $count_log2 > 30)
{
return $output;
}
$count = 1 << $count_log2;
$salt = substr($setting, 4, 8);
if (strlen($salt) != 8)
{
return $output;
}
/**
* We're kind of forced to use MD5 here since it's the only
* cryptographic primitive available in all versions of PHP
* currently in use. To implement our own low-level crypto
* in PHP would result in much worse performance and
* consequently in lower iteration counts and hashes that are
* quicker to crack (by non-PHP code).
*/
if (PHP_VERSION >= 5)
{
$hash = md5($salt . $password, true);
do
{
$hash = md5($hash . $password, true);
}
while (–$count);
}
else
{
$hash = pack('H*', md5($salt . $password));
do
{
$hash = pack('H*', md5($hash . $password));
}
while (–$count);
}
$output = substr($setting, 0, 12);
$output .= $this->_hash_encode64($hash, 16, $itoa64);
return $output;
}
}

Few comments:

The above code is taken directly from the phpBB codebase, I only made a couple of necessary changes to make it work with Zend Framework.
For those of you asking why didn’t I just use phpBB API and call its native functions, there is a reason for it. The phpBB code is written to be available with PHP 4. Zend Framework requires at least PHP 5.2.4. There are lots of globals and other scary stuff in the phpBB codebase which makes it impossible for its functions to be called from ZF controllers.
If you think I should have done something differently or I completely forgot to do something, please let me know.

Zend Framework IE conditional stylesheets and scripts

Richard Knop — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:27:17 +0000

You can append a conditional stylesheet in a controller action like this:

$this->view->headLink()->appendStylesheet('/path/to/some/styles.css', 'screen', 'IE 8');

Which would produce this markup:

Adding a conditional JavaScript file is similar:

$this->view->headScript()->appendFile('/path/to/some/script.js', 'text/javascript', array('conditional' => 'IE'));

And that would produce markup like this:

It can pretty useful when you need to use IE conditional comments just for a single controller action. Otherwise, if it applies site-wide, it’s better to just put conditional stylesheets and/or scripts in a layout file.