Zend just released Zend Server 5.0 a couple of days ago. As it has been the case for the previous versions, when downloading you can choose to get a version with PHP 5.2 or 5.3.

The Zend Server is available on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, covering the wide spectrum of  platforms making it an attractive development platform. This is specially important for Windows and Mac users where having a solid PHP installation is not so simple. The Zend Server comes with a complete PHP stack along with the most common extensions included. It also comes with a debugger which interfaces with Zend Studio allowing developers to put breakpoints in their PHP code.

Installation on my Mac with OS X went very smoothly. Everything was installed on /usr/local/zend. After completing the installation this is what I did to “fix” the installation for my needs:

• edited Apache’s config (/usr/local/zend/apache2/conf/httpd.conf) and added the following line so Apache listens on the standard web port.
  Listen 80
• Added my virtual hosts to conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf. Make sure this file is included in the main httpd.conf file with the following line:
  Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
• edited Mysql’s config (/usr/local/zend/mysql/data/my.cnf) to allow network connections by commenting the line  skip-networking.
• I restarted Zend server which in turns restarts Apache and Mysql with sudo /usr/local/zend/bin/zendctl.sh restart
• I did notice that if you want to connect to mysql from PHP using localhost, it fails because it does not find the mysql.sock in /tmp. I fixed this by created a link with this command:
  sudo ln -s /usr/local/zend/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock /tmp/

That’s pretty much it. After a few minutes, I had PHP 5.3 running and my Symfony/Zend Framework projects were up and running. By having the latest version of PHP 5.3, I am now able to play around with the newly released alpha version of Symfony 2.0!

We wanted to give a big thank you to Jon Lebensold for the great work he is doing with Zendcasts. He is really helping the Zend Framework community with some of the best Zend Framework webcasts out there and we are very excited to be sponsoring Zendcasts for our very first episode on the topic of Doctrine Relations and Data Fixtures. Exciting stuff baby!

Check it out at zendcasts.com

We are offering a special promotion of 10% off using the coupon code “zc” on any hosting product to celebrate this occasion.

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