A Package With It All

October 4, 2006 | By Terry Stockdale | In Apache Web Server, HTML, Web Hosting 

I recently installed XAMPP on my notebook computer, which is my main web development platform. In the Linux world, the term LAMP or LAMPP means “Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP” — in other words, the main web server, database and scripting packages used in the web development world.

XAMPP, then is Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP for “X” — multiple operating systems. XAMPP is a single downloadable package that installs all of these. Of course, you can configure them individually once they’re installed.
Previously, I had installed Apache and PHP on the notebook. But, after a hard drive failure with no image backup (that’s resolved now), I remembered reading about XAMPP.

The installation went very smoothly. The challenge was some of the customizations that I wanted to do, mainly not storing my “htdocs” folder in the place XAMPP had configured. It turned out to be easily solvable, once I realized what was happening (more on that later in another post).
The other thing that was non-obvious was that one of the relatively normal Apache modules was “commented out” by default in the httpd.conf file. Since I use the mod-rewrite.so module, I needed to delete the “#” sign from the beginning of the line

#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

in httpd.conf, stop and start Apache — and all was well. I use this module and the httpd-vhosts.conf file to be able to handle multiple “hosts” in my installation — my own “shared web hosting.”

By the way, the earlier versions of XAMPP mentioned that it was set up insecurely by default and that it should not be used for servers on the Internet. Based on my quick look, they’ve added a bunch of optional security tests. I haven’t spotted the same warning, but be sure to check carefully before using it for real-world web serving. It makes a great way to test web pages before making them available to the public.

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One Response to “A Package With It All”

  1. XAMPP followup at Drawing on the Web on October 7th, 2006 11:04 am

    [...] In a followup to my earlier post, my XAMPP installation on my notebook is working quite well, at least the Apache and PHP portions. I haven’t yet configured MySQL, but there’s a walk-through on setting it up. [...]

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