Lorenzo Alberton

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A step-by-step tutorial to install Firebird SQL on Windows and enabling its usage in PHP.

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HowTo: Install Firebird/Interbase with PHP on Windows. A step-by-step tutorial.

This simple tutorial assumes you already have a working PHP installation. There's plenty of guides on how to set up PHP, here I'm only showing how to make it interact with Firebird.

   

Requirements

• PHP
• Firebird SQL

Install Firebird SQL

• Download the zip archive: Firebird SQL 2.0.0
• Extract the archive to C:\firebird (for instance)
• Open a command prompt window (START, Run, "cmd")
• Run these commands, one by one:
  C:\firebird\bin\instreg i
C:\firebird\bin\instsvc i -s -a
C:\firebird\bin\instsvc start

Configure PHP

• Copy C:\firebird\bin\fbclient.dll to your C:\windows\system32 directory and rename the file to gds32.dll
• Copy php_interbase.dll from your php\ext directory to the C:\windows\system32 directory.
• Copy libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll from your php directory to the C:\windows\system32 directory.
• Edit your php.ini, un-comment the line
  extension=php_interbase.dll
  (you have to remove the semicolon from that line).
• Restart your webserver (Apache).

Install some Firebird SQL Tools

You can manage your databases with some tools:

• EMS SQL Manager for InterBase/Firebird: the free version is more than enough for a start.
• FlameRobin: another GUI tool, open source.
• ibWebAdmin: web frontend for the Firebird and InterBase database servers, written in PHP.

NB: the default admin username:password pair for Firebird is SYSDBA:masterkey.

Lorenzo Alberton

Lorenzo works as a Consultant / Software Engineer at Ibuildings, always busy with many cool clients. He's a long-time contributor to many open source projects.

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AJAX, Apache, Book Review, Charset, Cheat Sheet, Database, Firebird SQL, INFORMATION_SCHEMA, JavaScript, Linux, mod_rewrite, MySQL, Oracle, PDO, PEAR, PHP, PostgreSQL, Security, SPL, SQL Server, SQLite, Testing, Tutorial, TYPO3, Windows, Zend Framework