problem w/ PHPUnit reports on CentOS5/RHEL5

Yesterday I was trying PHPDocumentor and was going through its Quickstart guide. After I ran phpdoc on the sample code, I threw the reports in my CentOS5 Apache document root so that I could look at the output. Several of the pages wouldn't load. After a quick look at the Apache error log, I saw that those pages were generating PHP errors (the T_STRING gripe), even though the files were named something like sample.php.html.

(CentOS5 and RHEL5 have Apace v2.2.x.)

It took me a while to figure it out, but it's due to an odd feature of Apache which honors multiple extensions in filename. RHEL5 does an AddHandler php5-script .php which tells Apache to run all files with a .php extension through the PHP5 interpreter. I didn't know this, but it even does this for files with names like sample.php.html, where .php isn't at the end of the filename. So even though the phpdoc output files should just render as HTML, they were being interpretted as PHP and were throwing errors.

So I created a directory called /var/www/html/phpdoc and added the following to /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf in a Directory container (and restarted Apache): RemoveHandler .php

That convinced Apache not to run any files in that directory through the PHP5 interpreter. Incidentally, I had previously tried SetHandler default-handler for that directory, and it disabled PHP5, but it also disabled nice things like autoindexing (which broke URLs like http://localhost/phpdoc/sample/: Apache would refuse to serve a directory).

By the way, this doesn't seem to affect CentOS4/RHEL4 (Apache 2.0.x and PHP4), because Apache sets up PHP a little differently: it does an AddType, so there's no conflict of having both a text/html content type and a PHP5 handler.