Forums

On the page (jump to):

Create a PHP-MySQL Windows Azure Web Site and Deploy Using FTP

This tutorial shows you how to create a PHP-MySQL Windows Azure Web Site and how to deploy it using FTP. This tutorial assumes you have PHP, MySQL, a web server, and an FTP client installed on your computer. The instructions in this tutorial can be followed on any operating system, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. Upon completing this guide, you will have a PHP/MySQL web site running in Windows Azure.

You will learn:

How to create a Windows Azure Web Site and a MySQL database using the Windows Azure Management Portal. Because PHP is enabled in Windows Azure Web Sites by default, nothing special is required to run your PHP code.
How to publish your application to Windows Azure using FTP.

By following this tutorial, you will build a simple registration web application in PHP. The application will be hosted in a Windows Azure Web Site. A screenshot of the completed application is below:

Windows Azure PHP Web Site

Note

To complete this tutorial, you need a Windows Azure account that has the Windows Azure Web Sites feature enabled. You can create a free trial account and enable preview features in just a couple of minutes. For details, see Create a Windows Azure account and enable preview features.

Create a Windows Azure Web Site and set up FTP publishing

Follow these steps to create a Windows Azure Web Site and a MySQL database:

Login to the Windows Azure Management Portal.
Click the + New icon on the bottom left of the portal.
Click WEB SITE, then CREATE WITH DATABASE.

Enter a value for URL, select Create a New MySQL Database from the DATABASE dropdown, and select the data center for your web site in the REGION dropdown. Click the arrow at the bottom of the dialog.
Enter a value for the NAME of your database, select the data center for your database in the REGION dropdown, and check the box that indicates you agree with the legal terms. Click the checkmark at the bottom of the dialog.

When the web site has been created you will see the text Creation of Web Site ‘[SITENAME]’ completed successfully. Now, you can enable FTP publishing.
Click the name of the web site displayed in the list of web sites to open the web site’s QUICKSTART dashboard.
At the bottom of the QUICKSTART page, click Reset deployment credentials.
To enable FTP publishing, you must provide a user name and password. Make a note of the user name and password you create.

Build and test your application locally

The Registration application is a simple PHP application that allows you to register for an event by providing your name and email address. Information about previous registrants is displayed in a table. Registration information is stored in a MySQL database. The application consists of two files:

index.php: Displays a form for registration and a table containing registrant information.
createtable.php: Creates the MySQL table for the application. This file will only be used once.

To build and run the application locally, follow the steps below. Note that these steps assume you have PHP, MySQL, and a web server set up on your local machine, and that you have enabled the PDO extension for MySQL.

Create a MySQL database called registration. You can do this from the MySQL command prompt with this command:
```
mysql> create database registration;
```
In your web server's root directory, create a folder called registration and create two files in it - one called createtable.php and one called index.php.

Open the createtable.php file in a text editor or IDE and add the code below. This code will be used to create the registration_tbl table in the registration database.

<?php
// DB connection info
$host = "localhost";
$user = "user name";
$pwd = "password";
$db = "registration";
try{
    $conn = new PDO( "mysql:host=$host;dbname=$db", $user, $pwd);
    $conn->setAttribute( PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION );
    $sql = "CREATE TABLE registration_tbl(
                id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, 
                PRIMARY KEY(id),
                name VARCHAR(30),
                email VARCHAR(30),
                date DATE)";
    $conn->query($sql);
}
catch(Exception $e){
    die(print_r($e));
}
echo "<h3>Table created.</h3>";
?>

Note

You will need to update the values for $user and $pwd with your local MySQL user name and password.

Open a web browser and browse to http://localhost/registration/createtable.php. This will create the registration_tbl table in the database.

Open the index.php file in a text editor or IDE and add the basic HTML and CSS code for the page (the PHP code will be added in later steps).

<html>
<head>
<Title>Registration Form</Title>
<style type="text/css">
    body { background-color: #fff; border-top: solid 10px #000;
        color: #333; font-size: .85em; margin: 20; padding: 20;
        font-family: "Segoe UI", Verdana, Helvetica, Sans-Serif;
    }
    h1, h2, h3,{ color: #000; margin-bottom: 0; padding-bottom: 0; }
    h1 { font-size: 2em; }
    h2 { font-size: 1.75em; }
    h3 { font-size: 1.2em; }
    table { margin-top: 0.75em; }
    th { font-size: 1.2em; text-align: left; border: none; padding-left: 0; }
    td { padding: 0.25em 2em 0.25em 0em; border: 0 none; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Register here!</h1>
<p>Fill in your name and email address, then click <strong>Submit</strong> to register.</p>
<form method="post" action="index.php" enctype="multipart/form-data" >
      Name  <input type="text" name="name" id="name"/></br>
      Email <input type="text" name="email" id="email"/></br>
      <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>
<?php


?>
</body>
</html>

Within the PHP tags, add PHP code for connecting to the database.

// DB connection info
$host = "localhost";
$user = "user name";
$pwd = "password";
$db = "registration";
// Connect to database.
try {
    $conn = new PDO( "mysql:host=$host;dbname=$db", $user, $pwd);
    $conn->setAttribute( PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION );
}
catch(Exception $e){
    die(var_dump($e));
}

Note

Again, you will need to update the values for $user and $pwd with your local MySQL user name and password.

Following the database connection code, add code for inserting registration information into the database.

if(!empty($_POST)) {
try {
    $name = $_POST['name'];
    $email = $_POST['email'];
    $date = date("Y-m-d");
    // Insert data
    $sql_insert = "INSERT INTO registration_tbl (name, email, date) 
                   VALUES (?,?,?)";
    $stmt = $conn->prepare($sql_insert);
    $stmt->bindValue(1, $name);
    $stmt->bindValue(2, $email);
    $stmt->bindValue(3, $date);
    $stmt->execute();
}
catch(Exception $e) {
    die(var_dump($e));
}
echo "<h3>Your're registered!</h3>";
}

Finally, following the code above, add code for retrieving data from the database.

$sql_select = "SELECT * FROM registration_tbl";
$stmt = $conn->query($sql_select);
$registrants = $stmt->fetchAll(); 
if(count($registrants) > 0) {
    echo "<h2>People who are registered:</h2>";
    echo "<table>";
    echo "<tr><th>Name</th>";
    echo "<th>Email</th>";
    echo "<th>Date</th></tr>";
    foreach($registrants as $registrant) {
        echo "<tr><td>".$registrant['name']."</td>";
        echo "<td>".$registrant['email']."</td>";
        echo "<td>".$registrant['date']."</td></tr>";
    }
    echo "</table>";
} else {
    echo "<h3>No one is currently registered.</h3>";
}

You can now browse to http://localhost/registration/index.php to test the application.

Get MySQL and FTP connection information

To connect to the MySQL database that is running in Windows Azure Web Sites, your will need the connection information. To get MySQL connection information, follow these steps:

From your web site's dashboard, click the View connection strings link on the right side of the page:
Make note of the values for Database, Data Source, User Id, and Password.
From your web site's dashboard, click the Download publish profile link at the bottom right corner of the page:
Open the .publishsettings file in an XML editor.

Find the <publishProfile > element with publishMethod="FTP" that looks similar to this:

<publishProfile publishMethod="FTP" publishUrl="ftp://[mysite].azurewebsites.net/site/wwwroot" ftpPassiveMode="True" userName="[username]" userPWD="[password]" destinationAppUrl="http://[name].antdf0.antares-test.windows-int.net" 
    ...
</publishProfile>

Make note of the publishUrl, userName, and userPWD attributes.

Publish Your Application

After you have tested your application locally, you can publish it to your Windows Azure Web Site using FTP. However, you first need to update the database connection information in the application. Using the database connection information you obtained earlier (in the Get MySQL and FTP connection information section), update the following information in both the createdatabase.php and index.php files with the appropriate values:

// DB connection info
$host = "value of Data Source";
$user = "value of User Id";
$pwd = "value of Password";
$db = "value of Database";

Now you are ready to publish your application using FTP.

Open your FTP client of choice.
Enter the host name portion from the publishUrl attribute you noted above into your FTP client.
Enter the userName and userPWD attributes you noted above unchanged into your FTP client.
Establish a connection.

After you have connected you will be able to upload and download files as needed. Be sure that you are uploading files to the root directory, which is /site/wwwroot.

After uploading both index.php and createtable.php, browse to http://[site name].azurewebsites.net/createtable.php to create the MySQL table for the application, then browse to http://[site name].azurewebsites.net/index.php to begin using the application.