Anyone who has a server using PHP has undoubtedly heard of php.ini - it's the configuration file used to control and customize PHP's run-time behavior. It provides a simple way to configure settings. [...] In this article I'll give an overview of some important settings I believe you should be concerned with when tweaking your own php.ini file.

The tutorial's broken up into a few different topics:

• the PHP engine
• Short tags
• Output buffering
• Automatic headers and footers
• Handling errors
• Time zones

First of let me say that Magic Quotes is deprected from the PHP 5.3 and will be removed completely from the PHP 6. But as a developer you might face a situation when you have to work on application which runs on older version of PHP with some older functionality like rely on Magic Quotes.

They introduce the simple concept behind the magic quotes idea and, thankfully, the settings and code you can use to turn it off. It's been deprecated in PHP 5.3 but some older versions came with it enabled. If you're currently running with it on, it's highly recommended to turn it off and refactor your code accordingly.

While PHP's configuration capabilities are indeed powerful, the sheer breadth and different ways in which these configuration directives can be set are often confusing and downright intimidating to newcomers. So in this article it worth meandering from the typically intermediate-level discussion and instead offer some insight into PHP's configuration-specific infrastructure.

He starts by mentioning the phpinfo function that generates the complete list of current settings for your installation. With that in hand and an idea of what settings are out there, he starts going through some of the basics of working with ini settings - updating the php.ini, setting values via a .htaccess file and chancing them directly in the executing script.

I came across this question on Twitter last week: "How can I turn display_errors on for an application that is running in Windows Azure?" I have to admit that I was stumped. The only thing I could think of was to re-deploy the application with an updated php.ini file. But, I happened to mention this question to Ben Lobaugh who suggested a very simple idea: Store your PHP settings in some durable store external to your application as key-value pairs, then loop through the settings and update them with the ini_set function when a page loads.

He puts a big disclaimer on his suggestion, noting that it's "a hack and only a hack" and can be useful for someone still learning how to work with Azure and deployment. He shows how to use a Table storage to save the values and make them easier for the application to grab at runtime. Using the tools from their SDK, fetching and setting those values is a simple process. An idea like this, while convenient, could potentially cause performance issues down the line, do be careful with this recommendation (and be sure to load test).

While pure object-oriented languages produces mainly exceptions to signal an error, PHP started out as procedural and so it has a wide range of errors that can be raised along with exceptions.

He talks about a few of the most common error related issues:

• Exceptions
• Errors
• Error Types (E_NOTICE, E_PARSE, etc.)
• php.ini directives
• PHP functions for setting error handlers

One of the most popular uses is image uploads. Your users can submit photographs from a form without resorting to FTP or other convoluted methods. HTML5 and Flash also permit drag and drop, so the operation is likely to become easier as browsers evolve. This is where the problems can begin.

He points out the large size of the images most modern cameras work with and how PHP, with its basic settings, can't handle a lot of the resulting images. He mentions the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size settings you can set in either your php.ini or via an .htaccess (or even in your script). There's also a few helpful comments with more tips on large file handling.

I noticed that SugarCRM have just released their new version 6.0.0, and since my sugarcrm installation is madly out of date and I'm about to start using it again, I thought I'd just throw the old one away and install from scratch. I had no problems until I reached the final installation stage, when clicking the "install" button would return a 404.

After running through things a few times more, she finally corrected the cause of some of the errors of this final step - increasing the memory_limit setting, upload_file_size as well as installing cURL support for PHP. With these changes, the install worked perfectly.

The latest releases of the FastCGI Extensoin 1.5 and FastCGI update for IIS 7.0 have a new configuration setting monitorChangesTo that takes an absolute path to a file that FastCGI will monitor for changes. In case of PHP this means that you can set monitorChangesTo to a path to php.ini file, so that any time it is modified the FastCGI module will restart the php-cgi.exe to pick up the configuration changes.

He includes a few examples of how to use it with different versions of IIS - 5.1/6.0, 7.0 and the latest - 7.5. Configuration settings and screenshots are included as needed.

Configuring PHP is easy. You can change almost any aspect of the interpreter within the php.ini configuration file, e.g. modify error handling, increase memory usage, etc. Unfortunately, problems can occur when you move your application to a live hosting environment or are distributing the code to customers. ISPs usually lock down the php.ini configuration file - especially on shared hosting. This could cause your application to fail.

If you're lucky enough to be able to use htaccess files, his first method will work for you - using the "php_flag" or "php_value" directives to change settings for your entire application. The other option is more on an as needed basis - using the ini_set method to change configuration options. Be careful, though, only some configuration options can be changed using these methods. Some still require changes to the php.ini and a restart of the web server.

I have seen many developers who find difficulties when working with larger files upload in php. When files which are too large in size [...] If you are uploading file which is larger than 2MB size than here i am showing you the way to upload larger files using PHP.

The method's pretty much the same in each of the three methods. You can either have the settings in your httpd.conf (if you have access to it), in the php.ini or in a .htaccess file in the directory your PHP script is in.