Upgrading PHP on a Windows IIS Server (Really basic)

Following on from some recent OpenVAS testing and in turn discovering that some of our PHP versions were sorely out of date I’ve set about to patch and document all of the installations. In turn we have a simple guide on how to update PHP security releases!

Please note – this guide is aimed at really simple single server instances of PHP that are being used by Microsoft IIS, be sure to test the upgrade outside of your production environment before deploying it.

For this guide you will also need this link – http://windows.php.net which contains the downloads for PHP on Windows.

Troubleshooting:

• If you encounter an error message during the overwrite of the existing PHP install consider stopping the IIS server service first and then restarting it with the following commands from an elevated command/PowerShell prompt.
  • net stop WAS
  • net start W3SVC