I usually develop web stuff locally on my laptop (running Debian Etch) so I have Apache, PHP, MySQL and so forth installed. I thought it would be nice to have Zend Platform installed as well so I can do some debugging and profiling from Zend Studio. I downloaded ZP from Zend’s pages and started the installer.
After I had configured the Apache stuff (apachectl path, doc root+++) the installer stopped saying something clever like “http://localhost:80 Please check your web server or PHP configuration”. I thought I maybe had some PHP extensions loaded that ZP didn’t like but that was not the issue.
The problem was that the site I am developing at the moment uses an .htaccess file that does some rewriting according to the needs of the Zend Framework’s MVC stuff. After digging around in the installation scripts for ZP (written in PHP) I found out that ZP generates an info_<unique_id>.php file that includes a unique ID at the top (the same as in the script’s filename) and output from the phpinfo(); function. It uses this file to check for missing / not valid extensions I guess. The problem was that the .htaccess I had did some rewriting when ZP tried to access the info file it just generated. Instead of finding the unique ID and info about the PHP installation it got redirected to en error page complaining about an invalid controller. ZP obviously didn’t like this so it decided to give me the error message above.
All I had to do was disable the rewrite rule for a minute, do the installation, and then enable it again so I could go on with the development. :)