Beginner PHP Tutorial - 6 - The phpinfo Function Video Lecture | PHP for Absolute Beginners: From Novice to PHP Master - Web Development

hi this is Alex from PHP academy' org
and welcome to a PHP video tutorial for
the new Boston now after we've installed
PHP and perhaps later on in our PHP
development we may need to take a
detailed look at everything within our
PHP installation so for example you
might go on later to look at the GD
library so the GD library is used to
generate images using its command set so
it's a it's an addition to PHP it may
not be included well I know it's not
included with the original PHP
installation so for example if someone
was to say to you do you have curl
installed or do you have G HD image
installed and you know what these are
and there's different different
libraries for PHP but you needed to find
a way to quickly check everything in
your PHP installation and just find
general information about your PHP
version for example someone might ask
you or you might need to find out which
PHP version you're using because
obviously different features of PHP work
with different versions you may have a
an older version of PHP which then later
features aren't available so you always
want to check that your update to the
latest PHP version and you can check
this also using this PHP info function
that we're going to be talking about so
to call the function is relatively
simple it's just within your PHP tag to
remember we create our PHP tags like
this we can do PHP and then info and
then two brackets so this is the
standard notation for calling a function
you can see that my text editor hasn't
turned it blue like it normally would
with other other language constructs for
example echo you can see is
automatically turned blue this is
because it's a language construct within
PHP it's something that's built-in and
enables something to happen when we when
we run it so PHP info we're just calling
a function key you can see that it's
remained black just like when we type
something that
doesn't exist for example it's also
black so you need to watch out for this
this means that we're calling a function
so we're calling the function PHP door
in pit sorry PHP info and I've saved
this in index.php so let's come over to
our browser and let's refresh and see
what we get okay so here you can see
that we are listing a a selection of
data about our PHP installation so we've
got PHP version so very very top in
large letters we've got the version that
we're running and if we go down we can
see different things things that are
enabled for example not enabled then we
can come down and look at specific
things like inside the PHP core so a lot
of these will worm will be relative to
your PHP dot ini file which we looked at
previously and we will be looking at
later on in the tutorials so let's just
go down and see what information we have
ok so all this information we've got
information about Apache as well the
Apache environment so that's our web
server HTTP headers information down
here about BC math calendar and just
things like this that we don't have
installed currently and then we can come
down to things like FTP support Gd so
for example earlier I mentioned the GD
library you can see that GD support is
enabled we've got the GD version which
is bundled with this package etc etc
we've got support for different things
so you can find a lot of information out
about your PHP installation by just by
calling this function and it generates a
long list of thing details about your
PHP installation now one thing is really
really important you mustn't keep a file
with this function on your server you
must not have this live on a server in
fact even on your local machine if you
know that you're not protected against
people accessing this this will give
people lots of detailed information
about your PHP installation
now the reason I'm okay to show you is
because I'm working on a local machine
it's not giving any information that I
that
you know could harm my my computer
through my internet connection if you're
running a say a website and you had this
command somewhere on your website that
allowed people to view they can view all
sorts of information about your PHP
installation
so despite now seeing it work you also
must realize that if you have to do this
do it and then quickly delete it so
that's just a bit of security advice for
you so we've run through the PHP info
function which gives out information
about your PHP installation and
obviously you can use this when you need
to find out any specifics about your PHP
package