“application/x-httpd-php” downloading instead of being served by wordpress on freebsd

I did a fresh install of apache, wordpress etc for a friend today. Made a slight mistake in the order things were installed, such that instead of delivering WONDROUS wordpress documents, instead I was getting a download link for application/x-httpd-php. I was like “What the fudgemister is this?”

I did the sensible thing and goooooooooogled around a bit and found people saying that they couldn’t fix it except if they increased the amount of swap PHP was accessing.

Now, when I hear something like that I figure that’s a bullshit answer. What the hell does increasing PHP’s swap have to do with whether apache is interpreting the php file properly? And when I read the stats on some of the machines that were complaining about this, hell, they have more RAM available to them than I have swap + RAM on this machine, and some of my friends are running on machines that make my pentium3 500mhz, 128mb RAM machine look positively mighty. Not that that’s a bad machine at all, I’m rather pleased with it as a web server, but it’s nada by modern standards.

Anyway, where was I. Oh yeah, how to solve this issue? Well, as I say, I saw it as apache wasn’t interpreting the page but was instead serving it instead. So I had a lead.

I checked out httpd.conf and discovered that there was no line reading “php5_module”. I thought that was downright odd. It’s a consequence of installing apache after php, it seems.

I added the line “LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache22/libphp5.so”. But libphp5.so wasn’t installed.

The simple answer was to reconfigure php5. I installed it from the port, which is the only way I install software because I have a few custom flags in gcc so that stuff is compiled specifically for the p3 architecture. Anyway, how to solve this is: cd /usr/ports/lang/php5 && make configure —– make sure that the mod_php is checked and reconfigure that sucker.

If that doesn’t work, try out the php swap thing. Googling around will tell you how to do that, but for me the issue was mod_php not being installed. FreeBSD makes it very simple to install mod_php, as you can see. If you’re using OpenBSD, which is a badass OS, I imagine it’s exactly the same procedure, though I’ve never done it. Other OSes? I dunno, but google around for instructions. For example, a simple google for “mod_php install debian” revealed http://www.virtualmin.com/bug-tracker/bug?format=table&f_state=7&bug_number=563&project_id=1697, which tells you how to solve for debian.

But you should just install FreeBSD or OpenBSD, learn those systems and use those. They’re tasty.