My friend Marshall was recently having issues getting PHP5 installed and working on his Ubuntu server, which is a Debian based distribution.

We updated all the packages involved…Apache2, php5, libapache2-mod-php5, made sure the module was installed, restarted Apache2, etc. Nothing worked.

It turns out that the default php5.conf configuration for Debian / Ubuntu’s packages are using an incorrect syntax. Edit /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5 conf to reflect:

<FilesMatch \.php$>
  SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>

…instead of…

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

Special thanks to this Apache wiki article for pointing this out:

http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/DebianPHP

I’m just posting this solution here for all the other nerds having the same issue that aren’t finding this article in Google.