Installation and Configuration of PHP on Fonz fun_plug 0.5

This tutorial is deprecated and should only be used with fonz fun_plug 0.5!
Please check the tutorial page for updated tutorials on this topic!

PHP is a server-side scripting language that is widely used for developing dynamic web sites. PHP allows custom software to run on the server (in our case the NAS) hosting the web site.

PHP scripts are typically embedded in HTML pages. When a browser requests such a HTML page, the scripts are executed by the PHP add-in module of the HTTP server (here: lighttpd). Usually the PHP code inserts some additional HTML content into the version of the HTML page that gets sent to the browser. The browser (“client”) itself thus doesn’t see the scripts which were executed on the server.

In this tutorial we assume that the lighttpd HTTP server is already installed on the NAS (see tutorial on installing lighttpd On bigger systems, PHP is sometimes used in combination with an Apache server (instead of the leaner lighttpd) and an SQL database. This widely-used bundle of software tools is sometimes known as LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. The installation of MySQL on the NAS is covered in another tutorial.

1 PHP uses
2 Setting up PHP
3 Testing PHP
4 Using PHP
5 Optional: Using shared extensions
6 Notes

PHP uses

With regular HTML pages, your web server can only provide static content: all users see the same set of pages and the pages don’t change until someone (e.g. manually) updates the stored HTML pages. A server-side scripting language like PHP helps if you need to add dynamic content, such as a visitor counter (see example code below) or maybe news-of-the-day.
Public domain as well as proprietary PHP software is available for various applications including:

public domain
- personal photo galleries (e.g. Gallery (Gallery 2 also requires mySQL) or Dalbum)
- WikiPedia runs PHP-based software called MediaWiki.
- Blog and forum applications like WordPress
proprietary
- larger online shops
- online reference sites (Urban Dictionary)

Setting up PHP

Installation

Uli kindly provided a packaged version of php for the NAS in his repository.

PHP is not installed as part of fun_plug by default, but you should already have downloaded a copy as part of the general tutorial on how to download, install and upgrade packages. Let’s make sure you still have the latest version (as Uli upgrades his repository regularly). Note that the rsync command could take a while because it can download multiple packages depending on what is already in your /ffp/pkg/packages directory. Also note that you have to install curl additionally! As of PHP 5.2.17 you also have to install libiconv which is in fonz repository.

cd /ffp/pkg
funpkg -i /ffp/pkg/additional/dev-lang/php-*.tgz
funpkg -i /ffp/pkg/additional/net-misc/curl-*.tgz
funpkg -i /ffp/pkg/packages/libiconv-*.tgz

If you have a version of php installed that is outdated, you will need to run in upgrade mode instead (see here for help). Still, make sure you have curl and libiconv installed!

funpkg -u /ffp/pkg/additional/dev-lang/php-*.tgz
funpkg -u /ffp/pkg/additional/net-misc/curl-*.tgz
funpkg -u /ffp/pkg/packages/libiconv-*.tgz

Configuring PHP

PHP is configured with a file called php.ini. You thus need to copy one of the example-files from /ffp/etc/examples/ to /ffp/etc/ while renaming it to php.ini:

cp /ffp/etc/examples/php.ini-wolfuli /ffp/etc/php.ini

Configuring Lighttpd

To use PHP with the lighttpd-webserver, you have to use another configuration file as explained in the section on config files in the tutorial.

If you have a NAS other than the DNS-320, you execute the following:

cp /ffp/etc/examples/lighttpd.conf-with-php /ffp/etc/lighttpd.conf

If you have a DNS-320, you execute:

cp /ffp/etc/examples/lighttpd.conf-dns320 /ffp/etc/lighttpd.conf

Activation

Restart lighttpd to load the new configuration – including the PHP module. This can be done by rebooting the entire NAS or using

cd /ffp/start
sh lighttpd.sh restart

Testing PHP

You can test your installation of PHP by placing a file called index.php in the server.document-root directory (e.g. /mnt/HD_a2/www/pages) with the following content:

<H1>This is normal HTML</H1>
But the <U>following table</U> is generated by PHP:
<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Now go to the website on your NAS using the configured address and e.g. http://CH3SNAS:80. You should see a long page with configuration information for the PHP server as shown in the picture). This output is generated by the function call “phpinfo()“.

Using PHP

Let us now go back to a somewhat less intimidating and possibly even boring example: the standard “Hello World” in PHP. Copy and paste the following text to a file named helloworld.php and store it in the server.document-root:

<?php
echo "Hello World";
?>

Then go to the website on your NAS using the configured address and port and add /helloworld.php (the address may look like this: http://CH3SNAS/helloworld.php).

The following example shows a more complete web page (adapted from the lighttpd tutorial). It adds 3 features:

visitors are greeted using their IP address (using the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'])
any viewing of the web page triggers updates to a file (counter.txt) stored on the NAS
the web site uses counter.txt to show how often the page has been viewed

This requires three fragments of PHP code, each enclosed between and ?> tokens:




 
<?php
$fname = "counter.txt";             // The file where the number of hits gets stored
if(!file_exists($fname)) {          // If file doesn't exist..
    $countfile=fopen($fname,"a");   // .. create it
    $counter=0;                     // .. and initialize hit counter to zero
}
else {
    $countfile=fopen($fname,"r+");  // Open for read and write
    $counter=fgets($countfile,100); // Load number of hits by reading first 100 bytes
    rewind($countfile);             // Reset the file pointer to overwrite old counter value
}
$counter++;                         // Increment counter by one
fputs($countfile,$counter);         // Write the new value to the file
fclose($countfile);                 // Close the File
?>
 
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Hello PHP World!</title>
        <style type="text/css">
        <!--
                        h1 {text-align:center; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif;}
                        h2 {text-align:center;}
                        p  {text-indent:20px;}
        -->
        </style>
    </head>
 
    <body bgcolor = "#ffffcc" text = "#0000ff">
        <h1>Welcome, <?php echo $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; ?>, <BR>to the PHP world</h1>
        <h2>This page was viewed <?php echo $counter; ?> times</h2>
        <p><A HREF="page1.html">Link to page1</A></p>
        <p><A HREF="page2.html">Link to page2</A></p>
        <p><A HREF="https://nas-tweaks.net/">external link</A></p>
    </body>
</html>


Output of final example
 HTML output as visible using the browser's View Source feature

The first and by far the longest PHP section looks to see if a file name counter.txt exists in the server.document-root  If it doesn't exist, it creates it and decides there have been zero hits so far ($counter=0). Note that variables in PHP do not need to be declared and start with a $ and that no clear distinctions are made between numeric and string variables: conversions are done on demand.
If the file already exists, the first 100 bytes (should be enough for a decent number) are copied into $counter. Then $counter is incremented, written to the counter.txt file and the file is closed.
The remaining HTML code is similar to the code in the lighttpd tutorial. In the level one header (H1), a string is generated by a PHP echo command which prints the IP address of the remote client. In the level two header the value of $counter that was previously computed is used.


Optional: Using shared extensions
PHP allows the use of additional modules, so called "shared extensions". E.g. there is calendar for calendar-related functions. The modules are stored in /ffp/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/.


Available modules
You can list the available modules using:
ls -al /ffp/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/*.so
As of version php-5.2.6-3 the following modules are available:


Module
Description
Requires installation of ffp package


calendar
functions related to days/months/years and Unix timestamps	
-


ctype
character type checking	
-


ftp
File Transfer Protocol
-


gd
image processing
libjpeg, libpng


mbstring
manipulation of non-ASCII strings (e.g. unicode)
-


mysql
MySQL database access
mysql


pdo
PHP data objects
-


pdo_mysql
PDO interface to the MySQL database
mysql


pdo_sqlite
PDO interface to the SQLlite database
-


sqlite
SQLlite database access
-


tokenizer
access to PHP tokens found by the lexical analyzer
-


zlib
.gz file compression
-



Editing php.ini
If you want to add one or more modules, you need to edit the file /ffp/etc/php.ini.

Open php.ini and find:


;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Dynamic Extensions ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;


And add below the extension you want. E.g. to enable the calendar extension, you add:


; Linux extensions
extension=calendar.so
;extension=ctype.so
;extension=ftp.so


Afterwards you have to restart lighttpd to load the changes.


Demo of calendar extension
To see whether or not calendar was indeed loaded, you could run the PHPinfo.php script shown above.

Or run a script calendar.php containing:


<?php
for ($year=2000;$year<2011;$year++) {
    $days = cal_days_in_month(CAL_GREGORIAN,2,$year);
    echo "February in $year has $days days <BR>";
}
?>



Notes

PHP and HTML
A page with PHP code is generally stored on disk as HTML code with one or more fragments of embedded PHP. When the HTTP sends delivers the actual page to the browser ("client") the PHP sections have been interpreted and removed. In general they have been replaced by additional HTML code (see the counter example above). The receiving client thus does not see the PHP code and cannot even directly know whether PHP has been used to generate the served page.


Short open tag
If you want to use "<?" instead of "<?php" to mark the start of PHP code fragments, you need to change change the value of "short_open_tag" (line 131) in /ffp/etc/php.ini file to On:
short_open_tag = On
This is a matter of taste and convenience. When you distribute PHP code for use in other servers, you need to keep in mind that they may be set to short_open_tag = Off.


File extensions and default file names
HTML pages containing PHP code should have a .php extension. This tells the lighttpd server to pass the code via the PHP preprocessor before sending it across the network.
When you access the lighttpd server without providing a specific file name, it successively checks for files in the server.document-root directory(typically /srv/www/pages/) named

index.php
index.html
index.htm
default.htm

This is defined in a parameter called index-file.names in the lighttpd.conf file. As the list suggests, if you have both an index.php file and an index.html file in the same directory, the index.php file has precedence. If you explicitly ask for index.html, however, you will get that file instead of index.php.


Stateless
Note that after a page has been processed, when a new request for the same page is made by the same or another client, all computation starts from scratch: PHP is "stateless" in the sense that variables such as $counter are all lost after the page request has been completed. So the only way to track state in a PHP server is to store information in a file (as in counter.txt above), to store information in a database (another tutorial), or to assume the client maintains any relevant information between one page request and the next one.


Learning the PHP language
There are numerous books (printed and online) on PHP. See for example php.net.


Dealing with PHP errors
PHP syntax errors messages are appended to the Lighttpd error.log file. So if you are experimenting with- or developing PHP code, it can help to keep an eye on that file.

Module	Description	Requires installation of ffp package
`calendar`	functions related to days/months/years and Unix timestamps	-
`ctype`	character type checking	-
`ftp`	File Transfer Protocol	-
`gd`	image processing	libjpeg, libpng
`mbstring`	manipulation of non-ASCII strings (e.g. unicode)	-
`mysql`	MySQL database access	mysql
`pdo`	PHP data objects	-
`pdo_mysql`	PDO interface to the MySQL database	mysql
`pdo_sqlite`	PDO interface to the SQLlite database	-
`sqlite`	SQLlite database access	-
`tokenizer`	access to PHP tokens found by the lexical analyzer	-
`zlib`	.gz file compression	-



	
	
		Posted on December 12, 2010Author SvenCategories funplug 0.5Tags 0.5, Configuration, FFP, funpkg, Installation, package, Webserver





			
			26 thoughts on “Installation and Configuration of PHP on Fonz fun_plug 0.5”		

		
		
					
			
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												Geoff says:					


					
						May 31, 2011 at 02:34					


									


				
					The php test isn’t working for me.. I’m not sure where to look… my first problem was that I’m using a DNS 320, but didn’t have the /ffp/etc/examples/lighttpd.conf-dns320 file, found one on the web, but get a TLS error when use it. 
What can I check / look at ??
				


							

		
		
			
				
					
												Uli says:					


					
						May 31, 2011 at 10:15					


									


				
					Hi Geoff,
just follow the tutorial on installing lighttpd first, then execute this tutorial.
Cheers,

Uli
				


							

		
		
			
				
					
												Geoff says:					


					
						May 31, 2011 at 12:48					


									


				
					Uli,
I did follow the lightttpd install first, then this one.. but no luck on the php (lighttpd will serve up webpages, just the php portion is not being run).
G.
				


							

		





		
			
				
					
												Kurt says:					


					
						August 8, 2011 at 20:20					


									


				
					Just wanted to say thanks for all the tools, tutorials and maintenance work you do. It’s a stellar effort that greatly enhances the fun of having an NAS.
				


							

		

		
			
				
					
												jose gmay says:					


					
						August 21, 2011 at 21:18					


									


				
					Hi, my name is Jose, I am from Spain so please be patient with my English, I will try to do my best.

I have a DNS-323, I just started to install ‘fonz fun_plug’ and as fas as I know everything has gone well, I didn’t get any error.

Right know I have finished to install the lighttpd and that’s why I am writting this message.

It is supposed that my ports has changed from 80 to 81 (I mean to connect the standard configuration screen) and I will enjoy my new web server on 80. But nothing at all has happened in that way.

I still have the configuration screen in 192.168.1.11 as always (wich is my local ip for the NAS), even I have rebooted the system.

Althought, I created the three files; index, page1 and page2.html as the manual indicates me and located them into /www I can not reach them, of course.

Does anybody know what was wrong? I had read very carefully all the steps many times and I think I have not forgotten any of them.

It is like ‘sh /ffp/start/kickwebs.sh’ were not doing its job.

Thanks for your help.

I will be looking for an answer.

Kind regards.

Jose.
				


							

		
		
			
				
					
												oil says:					


					
						September 8, 2011 at 20:04					


									


				
					jose,
I have recently tweaked my DNS-320 by installing lighttpd and other packages. Try to login using ssh. If you are successful then verify by ps -A that there are two webservers running – lighttpd and lighttpd-angel and that they are running from /ffp/sbin path. I guess that is the starting point. If not then check that you have set the exec permissions for corresponding scripts in /ffp/start and that you have correct configuration files in /ffp/etc . With DNS-320 I have also noticed that doing reboot from ssh login sometimes does not start the funplug stuff (occurred to me on two occasions) so try to restart the NAS from original control webpage. I guess there isn’t much difference between 320 and 323 regarding these instructions.
				


							

		



		
			
				
					
												oil says:					


					
						September 8, 2011 at 20:13					


									


				
					I was wondering if anybody managed to make some simple php photo gallery run on DNS-320 ? I tried a couple of them and I always end up with processor running at 100% and page loading only half of the contents. I noticed that the process clogging up the system is /ffp/php-cgi. I doubt there is a problem with the php script as the situation is the same regardless of the gallery I tried. Could it be problem with some settings of php, lighttpd etc. ? I would like to have this running on my DNS-320: http://sye.dk/sfpg/

Any suggestions or experiences with php galleries would be much appreciated.
				


							

		

		
			
				
					
												BorgMcz says:					


					
						September 21, 2011 at 07:12					


									


				
					Hi,

 I have instalated webserver, php, mysql. PHP Info function refers to the mail program with the location of “Path to sendmail /FFP/ sbin/sendmail -t -i”, but the program does not exist. It can be added into the system?
				


							

		

		
			
				
					
												loquito says:					


					
						October 18, 2011 at 06:16					


									


				
					Tell me, what’s the problem? I do everything according to instructions.

Everything works until you reboot. After rebooting the nas on port 80 again comes built-in Web server.

Dlink DNS-320
				


							

		

		
			
				
					
												Esben Uth says:					


					
						December 28, 2011 at 23:04					


									


				
					Hey guys, just going through the guides for setting up my web server with php, found a problem in the guide, in my case at least.
when i try to write the line:

funpkg -i /ffp/pkg/additional/net-misc/curl-*.tgz
it returns fatal error, hence the file does not excist..
Went looking for the file and found out that it’s instead located in /ffp/pkg/additional/net-libs
so in my case the following line did the job:

funpkg -i /ffp/pkg/additional/net-libs/curl-*.tgz
thanks again for the awesome effort guys 🙂
				


							

		
		
			
				
					
												joe says:					


					
						January 22, 2012 at 00:29					


									


				
					This also through me a bit of a curve ball. I should have read the comments before hand.
				


							

		



		
			
				
					
												TryingPHP says:					


					
						January 31, 2012 at 00:04					


									


				
					Is there a way to get PHP 5.3.9 (rather than 5.2.17) on FFP on a DNS-325?  I am trying to install OwnCloud3 and it requires 5.3 or above for the calendar.  Any help is appreciated.
				


							

		

		
			
				
					
												Veselin M says:					


					
						April 1, 2012 at 22:32					


									


				
					Hi.

Thanks for great tutorial.
Just one note.

On my installation (DNS-320) line

funpkg -u /ffp/pkg/additional/net-misc/curl-*.tgz

fails with “file not found”

I search and found that curl package actualy is in

/ffp/pkg/additional/net-libs/

So the proper path is:

funpkg -i /ffp/pkg/additional/net-libs/curl-*.tgz
Without this package lighttpd.sh won’t start with php support
				


							

		

		
			
				
					
												Simon Willis says:					


					
						April 10, 2012 at 12:02					


									


				
					Thanks very much for these awesome tutorials. I’ve been able to set up lighttpd and php using your tutorials. I’m using FFP 0.7, so things have changed a little, but I’ve still managed to get it up and running. Thanks again for all the work you have put in.
				


							

		
		
			
				
					
												Steve says:					


					
						August 2, 2012 at 22:39					


									


				
					How did you get it to work on 0.7??

I’m having issued getting it to launch correctly. issues with fastcgi??
Thanks,

Steve
				


							

		
		
			
				
					
												Simon Willis says:					


					
						August 2, 2012 at 22:49					


									


				
					Hmmm. It’s been a few months, so I can’t really remember, sorry. I don’t recall having any major issues though. I probably used Slacker to install the most recent version of the required packages.
				


							

		
		
			
				
					
												Steve says:					


					
						August 2, 2012 at 23:16					


									


				
					Ok, so I got lighttpd to run and I can browse the directory via URL. Now I’m trying to run eXtplorer, but when I launch I get the following:
The extension ‘zlib’ couldn’t be found. Please make sure your version of PHP was built with ‘zlib’ support.
I’ve been using funpkg to do my installs. If I run Slacker I get FATAL: Empty Cache
Thoughts?
				


							

		
		
			
				
					
												Simon Willis says:					


					
						August 2, 2012 at 23:21					


									


				
					Ah, this sounds familiar. I think I had to disable zlib support or download the zlib library. Sorry for being vague. I think I may have found something about zlib on the DNS-323 forum. There are some 0.7 packages on there in one of the threads.
				


							

		









		
			
				
					
												Cesar says:					


					
						June 27, 2012 at 17:16					


									


				
					Wow!

Excellent tutorial.

I had already tried several other tutorials without success, but this one is perfect!!!

This was really super helpful, everything worked exactly as shown.

Thanks very much for spending time in this article.
				


							

		

		
			
				
					
												Andres Hernandez says:					


					
						September 14, 2012 at 19:57					


									


				
					Hola. sigo todos los pasos para activar el fun plug 0.5 y todo ya anda bien pero cuando quiero activar el mysql me dice fatal error.. y veo que no esta en el paquete… quiero saber como puedo descargarlo y poder instalarlo y ponerlo en funcionamiento. gracias por su ayuda
				


							

		

		
			
				
					
												Leonardo Mártyres says:					


					
						June 16, 2013 at 05:42					


									


				
					Hi there,
I bought an 320l and used ffpg 0.7, I followed the installation of Lighttpd (with both NAS admin and webserver), php and mysql tutorials. However,php not work properly! 
Getting this erros
server started

2013-06-16 01:37:24: (mod_fastcgi.c.1732) connect failed: Connection refused on unix:/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket-0

2013-06-16 01:37:24: (mod_fastcgi.c.3002) backend died; we’ll disable it for 1 seconds and send the request to another backend instead: reconnects: 0 load: 1

2013-06-16 01:37:24: (mod_fastcgi.c.1103) the fastcgi-backend /ffp/bin/php-cgi failed to start:

2013-06-16 01:37:24: (mod_fastcgi.c.1107) child exited with status 16 /ffp/bin/php-cgi

2013-06-16 01:37:24: (mod_fastcgi.c.1110) If you’re trying to run your app as a FastCGI backend, make sure you’re using the FastCGI-enabled version.

If this is PHP on Gentoo, add ‘fastcgi’ to the USE flags.

2013-06-16 01:37:24: (mod_fastcgi.c.2819) ERROR: spawning fcgi failed.
				


							

		

		
			
				
					
												Matt says:					


					
						April 8, 2014 at 17:34					


									


				
					Hi,
I have a similar problem to the person above. The lighttpd web server works fine, but I unable to get PHP working with it. I get the same errors (spawning FCGI failed) in the log file. I have a DNS-320 and the config file I am using with lightppd is lighttpd.conf-with-php
				


							

		

		
			
				
					
												Uli says:					


					
						June 17, 2014 at 14:58					


									


				
					Comments are closed as 0.5 is deprecated and no longer supported. Please do not use it on 0.7
Best Regards,

Uli
				


							

		

		


		
	
		Comments are closed.
	
	


	
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Installation and Configuration of PHP on Fonz fun_plug 0.5

Contents

PHP uses

Setting up PHP

Installation

Configuring PHP

Configuring Lighttpd

Activation

Testing PHP

Using PHP

Optional: Using shared extensions

Available modules

Editing `php.ini`

Demo of calendar extension

Notes

PHP and HTML

Short open tag

File extensions and default file names

Stateless

Learning the PHP language

Dealing with PHP errors

26 thoughts on “Installation and Configuration of PHP on Fonz fun_plug 0.5”