schmoozy space Mark Szpakowski's szpace blog

Okay, so others don't have to go through the hours I just spent trying to get a 15-minute install happen: I needed to get WordPress going on a Windows 2000 machine running Apache. I installed the latest stable PHP5 and MySQL, checked out that I could see my php.ini information in a web page, and then command-line queried MySQL to create a database and user for WordPress. But, after unzipping the WordPress files and customizing wp-config.php, and running wp-admin/install.php, I get the dreaded Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress message.

Well, I'll skip to the end. The key things:

• PHP5 doesn't come with automatic support for MySQL
• Edit your php.ini file, uncommenting so that you get
  extension=php_mysql.dll
extension=php_mysqli.dll
• Also add or edit to get
  ;Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside.
extension_dir = "c:/program files/PHP/"
• That last line is pointing to the top level of my PHP install directory, where I chose to put php_mysql.dll. I could also have created an ext directory there to put such things in.
• Put libmysql.dll in NT\System32 (probably anywhere in the Path will do)
• If you don't have php_mysql.dll and libmysql.dll, you can get them from snaps.php.net.