How to get your PHP program to work

• Use jEdit to write your program to take advantage of color-coding. This will help you catch mistakes such as a mistyped keyword.
• Don't write a large program all at once, write a little bit at a time. Test your program after every time you change or add something.
• To test, upload your file to your public_html (or its subfolder) on rynite. Type in its URL in the browser. If you get a file-not-found error, double-check the file name and its location.
• If the result is not what you expected and you don't immediately see a mistake, you can try to run the program directly on the server in a hope that you get some helpful information from the error messages:
  • login to rynite using ssh. In the lab type ssh rynite (or ssh yourusername@rynite if your user name is different on rynite) in the terminal window. Enter the password. On your home machine (Windows) you can install putty - a simple program that allows you to connect to a server via ssh.
  • Change the directory to where your file is located using cd command, for instance cd public_html/lab4.
  • Type php myfile.php (where instead of myfile.php you use the actual file name). This will give the HTML output of the program (if any) and error messages (if any). Some error messages are not very clear, but they usually give you at least some idea of what's wrong and point to a specific line in your program where the mistake was detected.
  • Correct the mistake in jEdit and upload your file again.