FileMaker is in the process of moving away from the XML and PHP interfaces and replacing them with the FileMaker Data API. At the same time they’re also rebuilding the FileMaker Server admin console.
One of the casualties of this process is there’s now no way to enable or disable XML or PHP from the admin console. This leaves us with two options – the Admin API, or the fmsadmin CLI.
In this post I’m looking at using the later because that’s how were working towards automating the deployment of an FMS using Ansible – I’ll post more on that once we’ve got the process solid, right now there are a still a few kinks to iron out when deploying to Windows!
So here’s what you need to do if you want to enable both PHP and XML.
fmsadmin SET CWPCONFIG ENABLEXML=true
fmsadmin SET CWPCONFIG ENABLEPHP=true
fmsadmin RESTART WPEAnd you should now be ‘good to go’. You can check the status of the CWP config using fmsadmin GET CWPCONFIG which will return something like this:
EnablePHP = true
EnableXML = true
Encoding = UTF-8 [ UTF-8 ISO-8859-1 ]
Locale = en [ en de fr it ja ]
PreValidation = false
UseFMPHP = trueIf you wish to enable the FileMaker provided version of PHP (as shown above) use fmsadmin SET CWPCONFIG USEFMPHP=true but given that FileMaker server is still shipping PHP 5.6 which reached end-of-life at the end of December 2018 and is no-longer supported (not even security fixes) you really, really, really shouldn’t be doing that!
These instructions don’t work at all for FMS18 or FMS19.
Every time I issue an “fmsadmin set cwpconfig enablephp=true” or “fmsadmin set cwpconfig usefmphp=false” command, those settings don’t change, it just ignores me. It replies immediately showing that those commands are still their old values, and “fmsadmin GET CWPCONFIG” confirms it. Restarting WPE, or even the whole machine, doesn’t help.
Obviously there is something more to it than the instructions provided here.
It’s really becoming frustrating that Claris made setting up FMS this hard. It didn’t used to take 3 days, but that’s how long I’ve been working on it so far, on a fresh stock OS install, and still do not have a usable installation. I suppose they imagine they do this in hopes it will drive us to willingly use the Data API, so they can continue to charge us indefinitely to access our own data from our own databases over our own network on our own premises with an app we already paid them to buy, rather than driving us to switch entirely, to less user-hostile platforms.
March 10, 2022 at 4:50 amI’m sorry to hear that you’re having issues Ray, however I’m unsure of what may be going wrong, since I’ve been successful in using the above commands with both FMS 18 and 19 and have just successfully confirmed the above commands on FMS 19.2 and 19.3.
I’d be happy to take a look at this with you if you want to get in touch directly.
March 15, 2022 at 7:13 am