Installing PHP on IIS and Windows 10

I needed to install PHP on a Windows 10 machine. It was a lot more difficult than I thought it’d be.

First I verified IIS was working on my machine (by default, IIS is installed but not activated).

Next, after a lot of Internet searching, I went to http://php.iis.net and clicked on the “Install PHP Now” button. Instead of installing PHP as I expected, I was directed to a page to install a tool called the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WPI) 5.0 (which would actually install PHP).

After the WPI tool installed, I searched it for PHP. There were a lot of results and zero guidance on what to choose. I took a stab at “PHP 7.0.9 (x64)”. After I clicked the Add button, several other components, presumably dependencies, were automatically selected. I clicked Install.

The result after about 10 minutes was about 8 or so “failed to load” responses. Dang it.

For the next several hours, I was googling error messages and slowly but surely getting components to install. For example, one fix involved changing a registry entry from “10” to “8”, and then back to “10”. Seriously.

It was now the next day. I checked IIS Manager and was pleasantly surprised to see I had a PHP Manager. This was promising. I wrote a tiny PHP test page, and, at last, success.