PHP and Environment Variables

[jgbishop]

I am fairly new to PHP, so I may be missing something obvious here...

I'm working with a Windows PHP install, and I have added some needed paths to my system PATH variable. However, PHP cannot see the updated variable's value! I was logged in as administrator when I set the environment variables, stopped IIS, restarted it, but got nothing. What am I doing wrong?

 

[jgbishop]

Ah. It now looks like this is an IIS issue. Apparently, IIS only picks up variable changes with a reboot. Sheesh.

 

[Drakkon]

you can also use the start/stop iis service to get php to update its variables
or instead of running it in ASAPII mode run it in CGI mode...requires a bit more setting up though

 

[juiio]

It isn't an IIS issue, it is just how environment variables on any system usually work. If a process is already running, you have to restart it to get the new enviornment variables.

 

[jgbishop]

Well, I finally got it working. There were two problems.

1. I had to reboot the machine. Restarting IIS does not update the environment variables. IIS is started as a service (i.e. it's started by services.exe). Since it starts as a service, it inherits all environment variables from its parent (in this case, services.exe).

2. The program installer I used had placed the environment variables I needed in the user section, not the system section. PHP looks at system-wide environment variables, not user-level.

At least I got it working.

 

[screw3d]

If it's a service, then you can probably manually restart it