Beginner PHP Tutorial - 5 - Writing Your First PHP File Video Lecture | PHP for Absolute Beginners: From Novice to PHP Master - Web Development

hello this is Alex from PHP academy' org
this is a video tutorial for the new
Boston now in this video tutorial we're
going to get to grips with the basics of
creating a PHP file what extension we're
going to give it and how we're going to
set up the inside of the file to ensure
that our web server deals with it
correctly because PHP isn't part of our
web server package we may need to
specify in Apache to look out for PHP
files and you can do this in your HTTP
comp file that we've already looked at
when we've set up our Apache
installation now PHP is server-side so
whatever you enter whatever you write in
between PHP tags will not be no will not
be able to be viewed by people usually
when you create an HTML HTML document
you'd start with your HTML tags you'd
obviously do it it do it much more
correctly than this we can start with
your HTML tags you'd create your body
tags and different information and
different functions the functionality of
the page will go in different places now
in PHP it's a lot more loosely
structured and the way we do things is
we use PHP tags now on their own PHP
tags look like this so you can see that
it is a it's a mirror image of a less
than sign first of all then a greater
than sign at the end here in between are
these X question marks sorry and then
just the words PHP it can also be
specified like this now this may look a
bit odd to you at first however what we
actually do is just after PHP here we
come down and everything we want to
write in PHP goes in here so every time
you set up a new page and you want to
include some level of PHP in it for
example you can combine PHP and HTML in
a page we could have our PHP tags here
and we could also have our HTML tags
down here so whenever you start up a new
page and your going to include PHP you
want to create a tags like that or like
that I probably recommend the use of the
PHP note notation at the end at the
start so these your PHP tags PHP code
will go inside here so how do we go
about saving our file so it can be
interpreted properly by our web browser
or our web server sorry
so we go ahead and we save the file now
I have a folder inside my htdocs folder
called series and this is where the
videos or the code for the videos for
the whole series will go I've created a
particular folder here called first file
so this is how we're going to access it
in our web browser we're going to go to
localhost series first file and then
we're going to have our file name here
so let's just call this document let's
say well we'll call it in next stop PHP
because typically an Apache installation
will take an in depth stop PHP and index
to HTML files as default files to be
loaded inside a folder and by that I
mean if your file is named anything else
so I'm going to call this just for file
dot PHP for now remember we're using dot
PHP you can just to be sure
choose all files here and enclose that
in in double quotation marks just to
make sure your text editor saves it with
a correct file extension so let's say
this we shown that we've saved this as a
PHP document my text editor context has
automatically turned on syntax
highlighting for PHP this just means
that PHP code and different different
aspects of code will be highlighted so
we can read things easier for example
variables are green
and function names are typically a gray
color and things like keywords so for
example for each which is a language
construct of blue and it depends so
strings can be prone for acceptor etc so
we've got this file and we've saved that
now if we come in here and refresh our
browser you can see that the file
appears here now if I click on this
that's our PHP document ready to go we
can start programming and we can start
displaying output to the user and
calculating and as you can see if you've
clicked to view the page source there's
nothing there
so let's combine some HTML with PHP and
see what happens and you can see now
that by just including some HTML tags
and refreshing the page you can see that
these actually show up
however our PHP code will be up here
however it won't be shown because it's
interpreted by our web server program
that's where everything's sort of
calculated and then we display the
output that we want using PHP so it's a
server-side scripting language as
opposed to HTML which isn't just tags
that are interpreted by different
browsers ok so like I said earlier you
can name your file and give it a
specific file name or you can choose to
name it index dot PHP so I'm going to
set up some PHP tags and I'm going to
save this as index dot PHP now this is
in this directory if we go back so when
i refresh in Lex dot PHP will
automatically be opened we won't have
this index or forward slash series
forward such first file we won't be able
to see the files we'll just be presented
with the index dot PHP page and to test
this I'm going to use a simple command
in PHP to demonstrate this I'm going to
say echo and this is my output
there's a tutorial on echo and what it
does or you'll see what it does but how
it works and a bit more information
about it so for now I'm just going to be
outputting this to the screen so let's
refresh the page you can see that we've
automatically gone to index.php my
browser doesn't show it up here but
let's just type that in manually so we
can definitely see so the page it's
automatically gone to index dot PHP if I
just choose to go to the file the folder
I mean is exactly the same so these are
different conventions of naming files if
you name something anything else other
than what's specified index dot PHP in
index dot HTML I think a default
specified in an Apache configuration
however normal files are not named to
open by default so that's a bit about
naming files and how you should name and
create your files and you've learnt also
how to set your PHP tags up ready to
code inside them