Apache is downloading php files instead of displaying them

Question

OS and server information:

• CentOS 6.4 (Final)
• Apache 2.2.15
• PHP 5.5.1

I previously had php 5.3.x installed but decided to upgr

Answer 1

Please take a look at your addtype directives.

It looks to me like Apache is telling the browser that it's sending a document type of application/php for scripts with extensions like .php5. In fact Apache is supposed to tell the browser that the script is outputting text/html.

Please try this:

AddType text/html .php

Regarding the suggestion above that you should tell the browser that you are outputting a PHP script: It seemed like an unusual idea to me. I googled it and found that there is quite a bit of discussion about it on the web. Apparently there are cases where you might want to say that you are sending a PHP script (even though Apache is supposed to execute the script and emit text/html,) and there are also cases where the browser simply doesn't recognize that specific Mime Type.

Clearing your browser cache is always a good idea.

In case it's helpful here's a copy of my /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf file from a server running CentOS 5.9:

#        
# PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language which attempts to make it                                             
# easy for developers to write dynamically generated webpages.                                                  
#

  LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so


  LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5-zts.so


#
# Cause the PHP interpreter to handle files with a .php extension.
#
AddHandler php5-script .php
AddType text/html .php

#
# Add index.php to the list of files that will be served as directory
# indexes.
#
DirectoryIndex index.php

#
# Uncomment the following line to allow PHP to pretty-print .phps
# files as PHP source code:
#
#AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps