samaxes

By adding Java to their App Engine, Google has opened the door for a whole slew of languages that have been implemented on the JVM, now including PHP via Quercus.

This weekend I decided to give it a try and deploy a (very) old tutorial of mine - PHP Tutorials - on GAE.

I must admit that I was very pleasantly surprised by how effortless it was. OK, it’s a very rudimentary PHP application, the only PHP code used was to run the examples described on the code blocks and do some includes; nevertheless I didn’t feel the need to change a single line of code.

Also, deploying a Java application to GAE is simpler than a Python one. Not only because you have a very handy Eclipse plugin, but you will also find configuring the file appengine-web.xml a lot easier when compared to app.yaml.

All you need to do in order to deploy a PHP application, at least as simple as the one I’ve tried, is to follow these steps:

1. Install Google Plugin for Eclipse.
2. Create a Web Application Project in eclipse. The complete project directory looks like this:

   Guestbook/
     src/
       ...Java source code...
       META-INF/
         ...other configuration...
     war/
       ...JSPs, images, data files...
       WEB-INF/
         ...app configuration...
         lib/
           ...JARs for libraries...
         classes/
           ...compiled classes...
   

3. Copy all your PHP and static files to your-project/war.
4. Download Quercus binary (WAR file).
5. Unzip it and copy all files inside quercus.war/WEB-INF/lib to your-project/war/WEB-INF/lib.
6. Edit your deployment descriptor file web.xml. Mine looks like this:
   ^?Download web.xml

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" version="2.5"> <description>PHP Tutorial</description>   <servlet> <servlet-name>Quercus Servlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>com.caucho.quercus.servlet.GoogleQuercusServlet</servlet-class> </servlet>   <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>Quercus Servlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>*.php</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping>   <welcome-file-list> <welcome-file>index.php</welcome-file> </welcome-file-list> </web-app>

7. Edit your configuration file appengine-web.xml. Mine looks like this:
   ^?Download appengine-web.xml

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <appengine-web-app xmlns="http://appengine.google.com/ns/1.0"> <application>php-tutorials</application> <version>1</version>   <!-- Configure java.util.logging --> <system-properties> <property name="java.util.logging.config.file" value="WEB-INF/logging.properties" /> </system-properties>   <static-files> <include path="/**" expiration="600s" /> <include path="/**.png" expiration="30d" /> <include path="/**.jpg" expiration="30d" /> <include path="/**.gif" expiration="30d" /> <include path="/**.ico" expiration="30d" /> <include path="/**.swf" expiration="30d" /> <include path="/**.css" expiration="7d" /> <include path="/**.js" expiration="2d 12h" /> <exclude path="/**.php" /> <exclude path="/**.inc" /> </static-files> <resource-files> <include path="/**.php" /> <include path="/**.inc" /> </resource-files> </appengine-web-app>

Et voilà, you are done!

Now, run your application using the Run As >> Web Application command.
And finally, press the “Deploy App Engine Project” button to deploy to GAE.

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