browser downloads php file from apache web server

Question

I have an apache web server. Let's say this server's domain is example.com.

When I access example.com, then the index.php file is correctly displayed in the browser.

However, when I access e.g. example.com/~user, then the index.php file of /home/user/public_html/index.php file is downloaded rather than displayed.

How do I fix this problem? I changed "expose_php = Off" in php.ini, but nothing has changed.

Answer 1

If you are on Debian/Ubuntu take a look at this file /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5.conf

mine looks like this and you can see I had to comment some line to get PHP working in the user dir

<IfModule mod_php5.c>
    <FilesMatch "\.ph(p3?|tml)$">
        SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
    </FilesMatch>
    <FilesMatch "\.php$">
        SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
    </FilesMatch>
    <FilesMatch "\.phps$">
        SetHandler application/x-httpd-php-source
    </FilesMatch>
    # To re-enable php in user directories comment the following lines
    # (from <IfModule ...> to </IfModule>.) Do NOT set it to On as it
    # prevents .htaccess files from disabling it.
    #<IfModule mod_userdir.c>
    #    <Directory /home/*/public_html>
    #        php_admin_value engine Off
    #    </Directory>
    #</IfModule>
</IfModule>

Please note that after editing the file you would have to restart apache for the modifications to take effect, the command to restart apache on a debian based system is: /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Answer 2

Hope this saves someone else the headache. I know this question is old, but it still comes up when searching for this problem.

I'm not sure if this works across all installations of apache2, but I am running apache2 on ubuntu and had the problem of my web browser downloading files instead of displaying the correct index file.

The problem lies in the file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf The default document setting here was overriding what I had set in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

So just open up /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf and change the order of the files listed.

:)