I have Apache 2.2 and Php 5.2.5 installed, and fought my way thru the horror and byzantine weirdness of SELinux (probably a good idea to have the full SELinux, since
it will keep you safe – even though the learning curve is
a tad steep…). I got a test server running, but
I still could not see anything from my info.php file!

I just got a completely blank page, regardless of
location of info.php file! I’m running Fedora 9.
I updated the httpd.conf file with module loading
for php and directory index value, and restarted httpd.
And all the file-context values for SELinux are set
to type httpd_sys_content_t. I could see my webpages
as .html files, but could not seem to execute a simple
.php script. Most frustrating.

I then waded thru megabytes of doc… Seemed to me that
this was much more difficult than was reasonable.
I even wondered if that was someone’s plan…hmmm??

I could start php at CLI, and this;

[root@...] php -r “phpinfo();”

worked just fine. I had also tweaked the SELinux boolean
values via:

/usr/sbin/setsebool -P httpd_enable_homedirs true

and so on, so I can get view html files correctly, and
so I can use the “public_html” dirs on other userids
than just the server’s DirectoryRoot…
All the browsing stuff worked ok across a local LAN, and
on the local Fedora-9 box, but nothing seemed to allow
the php code to be executed by the blasted server.

So, here is specifically where I screwed up:
In examining the /var/log/httpd/error_log file, I
found that I was getting a “PHP Parse Error:” !!
Is this file:

not right???
No it is not. You must not have the space in the
first line. Or, just delete the “php” string entirely.
With this file:

You will get a nicely formated PHP 5.2.5 page when
you load it with your browser… eg:

http://xx.xx.xx.xx/~ahomedir/info.php

assuming you have all the SELInux permissions set up
right, and can load .html files from your “public_html”
subdir on your various home dirs.
The killer here is that if the info.php file is wrong
(with that line1 embedded space), you get no info at the
browser end. It just looks like PHP isnt running,
when it probably is. Check its install status with
the “rpm -qa” command mentioned above, and make sure
you have edited the httpd.conf file to include all the
stuff for loading the module, and processing the .php
file extension. Hope this blather is useful for someone
going thru the setup of Php/Apache and the other goodies.
- Rus

@ Sergey Lempert. We look forward to receiving advice on the “best method”!