A Complete Guide to Installing MySQL and PHP with IIS

Here is the article. 

One of my latest projects was setting up WordPress, the popular content management system, on a client’s web server which was running Windows Server 2008. WordPress requires installations of MySQL for the database back-end and the PHP scripting language in order to serve up the WordPress content. On a local Windows machine, I’d probably just use a pre-configured WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack package like XAMPP which is installed quickly and includes all the necessary components. That’s not quite an option in a professional environment, though. I was also working with Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 for the web server instead of Apache so the process is a little more involved.

Click here to read more about using XAMPP to create a local installation of WordPress.

In addition to installing the components, PHP must be be configured to work with MySQL so that WordPress, which maintains all the site content in MySQL, can access the database as needed. Having only previously done this in Linux with Apache as the web server, I had to do a little research. It was not painless – WordPress is a little finicky on IIS / Windows and I had to research my way past a couple stubborn errors.

For everyone’s benefit, I thought I’d share what I learned here. I’ve tested this process on both Windows Server 2008 and 2012 and noted the differences where necessary.