HOWTO: Setup easy web development environment (XAMPP)

[Cicer]

After I link my ~/public_html to /opt/lampp/htdocs/norton, I can't view my public_html on FF. It says that "You don't have permission to access /norton on this server."
What's wrong with this, anyone?
Thanks.

Did you check if the link you've made is broken? I don't know how to check it with Terminal, but if you go to the folder with nautilus it will tell you with the icon and under the "type" column. I had the same problem as you and was changing permissions left and right until I realized I had a miscapitalization between the ~/Public_html folder I had created and the ~/public_html folder I had addressed the link to.

[PaulWhipp]

Very handy.

Here is a little addition that might be useful:

Once you have lampp running on your system there will come a time when you want command line access to the mysql databases, for backup or perhaps for something that is too much trouble in phpmyadmin.

You can use synaptic package manager to install the mysql-client meta package.

Once installed, you can point it at your lampp mysql database by creating a .my.cnf file in your home directory and setting up its contents as follows (use your real username/password as appropriate):

[client]
user=root
password=secret
socket=/opt/lampp/var/mysql/mysql.sock

This allows you to use mysqldump etc. from the command line and have it act on your databases in lampp. For example:

$ mysql
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 36
Server version: 5.0.67 Source distribution

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> use test
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed
mysql> show tables;
+----------------+
| Tables_in_test |
+----------------+
| names          | 
| orders         | 
+----------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from names;
+-------+
| name  |
+-------+
| ****  | 
| harry | 
| tom   | 
+-------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> quit
Bye

mysqldump is great for backups, mysqlimport is handy for large data imports and there are a number of other handy utilities in mysql-client just

apropos mysql

and use man to check them out.

[xihad76]

Thank u very much bro.. it was really very very helpful

cheers!!

[kodemind]

... If you read this and use it could you leave a reply saying if it was useful/useless? I'd like to keep improving this how-to, so feedback would be good.

Plus, replies bump it up the list.

Thank for the tut, very precise. I was wondering if you could add more info about running xampp as a single user...

Its default is to run as 'nobody'. Some users have had success by..

chown nobody:user *
chmod 0775 *

Possibly adding directions to run as single user so they can chmod files to 0755 or similar for better security.

Again great work!

[jlhaslip]

Thanks for the Tutorial on XAMPP. Worked great.

[sitmex]

Hi, first of all, thanks for posting this helpful guide.

How can I set it up so it start automatically when startup.

Using: Ubuntu 8.10
Experience: newbie.

I've tried to set it at: the sessions application but no luck.

[PaulWhipp]

To start lampp automatically when you start the session

gksudo gedit /etc/rc.local

Then add the following line somewhere after the comments and before
the exit 0 statement at the end of the file:

/opt/lampp/lampp start

Treat rc.local with care, all commands here executed as the super user and we need that to start lampp.

For normal automatic startup items you were right to look to the Administration > Services or Preferences > Sessions menu options.

[duffboy]

I went through this tutorial and do thank you, it is well done.

However, when I go to access my localhost/username folder I get a 403 forbidden error.

The link to the public_html folder in the /opt/lampp/htdocs folder is working.

I am not too sure how to handle this. I am a Ubuntu novice with some understanding, but that is about the extent of it. On the bright side, once I can figure this out, I will be one major step closer to leaving Windows behind me for good!

[PaulWhipp]

When you create local websites on your machine under the /opt/lampp/htdocs folder you need to set the file access permissions to be appropriate for general web access otherwise you may see permission errors such as 403.

You need to ensure that the file permissions on your website files allow the user 'nobody' access because this is the user that apache uses to access your web site files when it gets asked to serve up the page by your browser.

For this its probably easiest to give everyone ('others' in Unix speak) read and execute access on the directories and files as appropriate:

Change directory to the relevant website folder (~/websites/test for example) and execute the following:

~/websites/test $ find . -type d -exec chmod o+x {} \;
~/websites/test $ find . -type f -exec chmod o+r {} \;

The first command finds each file of type 'directory' and gives 'other' users the ability to execute (cd to) the directory.

The second command finds each file of type 'file' and gives 'other' users the ability to read the file.

Also, be sure to take the read access off any files that contain configuration information (such as usernames and passwords to access databases). For example:

~/websites/test $ chmod o-r configuration.php

You might wonder how come you can take the read access off a file like configuration.php but can't take it off a file like index.php. I certainly did.

I believe that this is the reason:
When apache accesses the site file it does so as 'nobody'. However, when the php script executes to generate the html for the browser it executes as the php script owner. Thus configuration.php is protected against someone trying to directly access it but it can still be accessed by your php files.

[duffboy]

Thank you so very much. Worked like a charm.

That was my last major hurdle as I am now, effectively, Windows free!