HowTo: Install Firebird/Interbase with PHP on Windows

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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

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.