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Jon Cox
Asked: 2010-12-23 07:34:45 +0800 CST

What causes PHP pages to consistently download instead of running normally

  • 772

I'm running a Ubuntu Server on a VM, to test out different web forum solutions. I have set up a ~/public_html/ to be accessible with the apache2 web server, and that works fine.

However when I go to a .php file on a browser (using my VM's ip-address/~username/phpfile.php) it does not display it as it should. Instead it offers to save to file/asks what program to open it with. Interestingly though that dialog box does recognise that it is a php file.


I have the following version of php installed on the system:

PHP 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.5 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Sep 17 2010 13:49:46)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies

And the following server:

Server version: Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu)
Server built:   Nov 18 2010 21:19:09


If anyone knows what might be causing this/potential solutions it would make me very happy :)

EDIT: Turns out files this behaviour was only apparent on files in the ~/public_html/ directory. All php files in /var/www/ work fine.

Prizes go to whoever can explain why? :D (And by prizes I just mean a well done, no actual prizes I'm afraid.)

ubuntu php apache-2.2 php5

7 Answers

  1. You might have only have the cli version of PHP installed currently try

    sudo apt-get install php5

    and restart apache

    sudo apache2ctl restart.

    You can also check the PHP module is loaded into apache by doing

    sudo apache2ctl -M

    Which if the module is loaded then it should show something like

    Loaded Modules:
 ...
 php5_module (shared)
 ...
Syntax OK
    • 6

  2. add this to your apache config

    AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
    • 5

  3. You need to configure apache so that it will start the php interpreter when a .php file is requested instead of just returning the file's contents.

    This needs to be done in httpd.conf for the directory in question. It would look something like this:

    # Use for PHP 5.x:
LoadModule php5_module        modules/libphp5.so
AddHandler php5-script php 

# Add index.php to your DirectoryIndex line:
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

AddType text/html       php
    • 2

  4. I had the same problem actually in the user's public_html directory and I found that in the /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5.conf file there are some comment lines included and here they are:

    # To re-enable php in user directories comment the following lines
# (from <IfModule ...> to </IfModule>.) Do NOT set it to On as it
# prevents .htaccess files from disabling it.

    I did what it says and restarted apache and the problem had gone.

    • 2

  5. Check .htaccess for AddType row. I had a custom AddType which caused bad content-type. Firefox helped me debug the issue, but you can also use wget.

    Firefox Wget

    • 1

  6. Easy to forget, but a common way this happens is forgetting the opening and closing <?php ?> tags.

    • 0

  7. I've recently got this problem and after eliminating all other causes in this thread, I found that mod_php5 extension (in my system at /usr/lib64/apache2/mod_php5.so ) was without executing pemitions.

    After chmoding it it worked.

    • 0