PHP5 is installed, but Apache is displaying PHP as uninterpreted text. How can I get it to process it as PHP?

Question

In a Drupal installation, it's displaying the root PHP file as plain text below. a2enmod says that php5 is enabled, aptitude says libapache2-mod-php5 is installed, mods-enabled/ has php5.conf and php5.load, the VirtualHost has DirectoryIndex and ScriptHandler specified. It's kind of like the government economist computer virus: every indicator you can find says that your system is fine, but it doesn't work. What else should I do to get this Drupal 7 site in motion?

The page displayed is:

<?php

/**
 * @file
 * The PHP page that serves all page requests on a Drupal installation.
 *
 * The routines here dispatch control to the appropriate handler, which then
 * prints the appropriate page.
 *
 * All Drupal code is released under the GNU General Public License.
 * See COPYRIGHT.txt and LICENSE.txt.
 */

/**
 * Root directory of Drupal installation.
 */
define('DRUPAL_ROOT', getcwd());

require_once DRUPAL_ROOT . '/includes/bootstrap.inc';
drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);
menu_execute_active_handler();

Solution 1

Just had the same problem, though not with Drupal - Finally discovered the short_open_tag parameter which apparently now defaults to "Off" - my application is written entirely using the short open tags. Changed it to short_open_tag = On and it came right up.

Solution 2

This sounds like apache is not configure properly to run php scripts

Check either of these files /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf or /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf for these two lines

AddHandler php5-script .php
AddType text/html .php

then restart apache

service httpd restart

Comments

[Ergec]

Yes like @PauloAlmeida said you are supposed not to configure this deep. Probably installation went wrong at some point and you may face more in the future. I suggest you to follow howtoforge.org tutorials to setup your server. Just google "perfect server centos 6.4" or whatever you use and follow their configuration for apache php mysql and other.

[Christos Hayward]

a2enmod php5 says PHP(5) is there, and dpkg-reconfigure libapache2-mod-php5 plus a restart made no discernible difference. Is there an aptitude reinstall that I can do that will reinstall everything from scratch? Something like aptitude reinstall apache2 php5 mysql-server ...?

[Michael Hampton]

Oops! Short open tags have been discouraged for years; you should fix that at the earliest opportunity.

[jdhildeb]

Thanks - fixed it for me. This is a PHP setting. See here for more details: stackoverflow.com/questions/12579448/…