Enabling PHP Extensions (FileInfo, etc) on Plesk for Windows

I was recently working on a PHP project that was hosting on a Windows server within the Plesk environment. Despite the FileInfo PHP extension supposedly enabled by default from PHP version 5.3 onwards, on Plesk for Windows based PHP installations it is commented out.

Each ‘subscription’ (hosted website) in Plesk has its own set of PHP options, including the ability to add directives to the PHP.ini file for that subscription – unfortunately the directives bit seems to do bugger all in my experience.

So to enable extensions, you must go directly to the primary PHP.INI file – on my Plesk server this was located at:

PHP 5.3
C:Program Files (x86)ParallelsPleskAdditionalPleskPHP53php.ini

PHP 5.4
C:Program Files (x86)ParallelsPleskAdditionalPleskPHP55php.ini

To enable the FileInfo extension I simply did a search in the php.ini file for the line with ‘extension=php_fileinfo.dll’ and removed the semi-colon that was ‘commenting it out’.