Beginner PHP Tutorial - 4 - Creating Your First PHP File Video Lecture | PHP for Absolute Beginners: From Novice to PHP Master - Web Development

hi this is Alex from PHP academy' dorg
and back with another video for the new
boston now in this tutorial we are going
to go on from our previous tutorial
where we installed xampp for windows now
now that we're at this stage where we've
installed the installed xampp we've
accessed localhost we've tested that PHP
myadmin work so where we've run our our
MySQL databases for when we look at
databases a lot later on and we've also
brought to attention the xampp control
panel here which allows us to start and
stop particular services and the
services that we focused on are apache
and mysql because these are two that we
may use most frequently okay so now this
tutorial is basically going to cover how
to create your PHP your first PHP file
and we're going to do some little bit of
an output in it nothing major because we
have other tutorials explaining sort of
output and the PHP info function as well
so have a look at the other tutorials
and you'll you'll find some great
information on that okay so let's go
ahead and we need to think about opening
up this folder here let me just bring it
in to view this folder here called xampp
and this is a C colon backslash xampp by
default
depending on how you installed your
xampp installation depending on how you
run the installation this might be
different but by default it's C colon
backslash xampp or whatever drive you've
installed it so so replace this with
your drive number and letter sorry okay
so in here we've got a few folders you
can see some of which were useful to us
some of which are not we have our PHP
installation folder which contains all
of dll's
PHP dot ini so let's find that got PHP
dot ini here etc etc so when there's
another tutorial on PHP dot ini so go
and check that out okay so htdocs is the
folder that I want to focus on in this
tutorial because we're going to be
creating our first file now inside
htdocs' at the moment it's a bit of a
mess for me I've got a few files in here
but we want to create our
PHP file in here so um in let's just
open up our browser so you know now that
we access our website from or our local
server from localhost now we don't need
to do localhost /ht Docs forward slash
and our file because htdocs here well no
in here is where is the root directory
if you like for where our file should be
so let's go ahead here and I'll create a
new text document and I'm going to call
this my first file dot PHP now in
Windows I have extension naming enabled
so I can automatically name my extension
but if you can't do it this way you can
see I've got if you change a file name
extension blah blah blah click yes and
that's changed now to a PHP file now
this C icon you see is my text editor my
default text editor and my default text
editor is context so usually you know
you might have notepad as your default
text editor I recommend if you're going
to start learning PHP download a good a
good text editor I use context I've
always used context may prefer however
some people prefer to use notepad plus
plus or even just notepad and I mean
there are many out there that you can
use depending on what platform you in as
well you might be running a Linux system
so you may have different text of a bed
'it is available to you so i've created
this file like this now what you can do
is let's delete that and let's go / -
let's go over to my text editor so i've
got my text editor open here i'm going
to create a new file and i'm going to
save this I'm going to close save as and
I mean in my htdocs folder here so I'm
going to type my first file PHP and then
down here I'm going to save as type all
files to make sure that the extension is
read now watch what happens to this just
up here this text files bit here when I
click Save so let's get this interview
as well I'm going to click Save and you
can see that's automatically change
syntax highlighting for my file so now
the PHP extent
is applied we can see that that files
been created there for us the extension
has been applied
now syntax highlighting has been turned
out on now syntax highlighting if you've
ever programmed before you know
highlight specific parts of the syntax
so constructors variables string data
and integers things like that
just everything will be highlighted
differently depending on how your text
editor handles that and you can modify
that as well from options menus but
we're not here to talk about that we're
here to talk about the first PHP file
now inside our PHP file let's just
actually go to our browser first and try
and access this so we know this is saved
in C colon backslash xampp and htdocs'
so let's go ahead to our browser and
type in my first file dot PHP so
remember htdocs is the root folder so
all we need to do is say localhost
forward slash my first file dot PHP we
press ENTER and this file has been
loaded in now because it's a PHP
extension you might think that you can't
put HTML data in but we can in fact
write data into here and just either
plain text or HTML and when we refresh
that's displayed on the page so you can
see now that we're accessing our files
like we would on a normal server and
again you can create folders directories
in here and and create things as you
wish so to create the first PHP file
we've done this and our tags look like
this you'll notice that we've have a
less than sign a question mark PHP and
then we end the question mark in here so
that's very similar to how we open up
and close HTML so we open up tags like
that and in tags like that in PHP we do
this but that's not what this tutorial
is about we've created our file we've
accessed it from our from our web server
and now you can go on to the tutorials
where we talk about echoing out data to
the user and so on and so forth and you
can start your journey learning PHP