Developing while offline

Anon

I am looking for a way to do some of my PHP programming while I travel. I'd like to be able to install and application on a laptop that will allow meto code and test locally, then I can upload my changes to the network and tweak them. Is there a good way to do this?

Anon

I am running windows 2000 pro on my laptop, I downloaded and installed the apache binary for win32 (http://www.apache.org) and php 4.0.4 for win32 (http://www.php.net) and am able to develope locally. Once you have installed everything, type http://localhost/ into your browser and you'll be looking at the local apache website installed on your machine.

Anon

I was just checking out thesite with php for windows, and it says you have to install it as a module and warns that it's pretty unstable. I have Windows 98 on this laptop. Did you have a lot of trouble getting it set up?

edwardsbc

You can install PHP as either a ISAPI application (php4isapi.dll) or as a CGI (php.exe). I have been using the ISAPI version on both Win98/PWS and NT4/IIS4 with good results. I think the trouble you have will depend on the server load and how well tested the functions are under windows. The ODBC functions seem stable. Some of the other database functions may not be as well tested.

As you are only doing this for development, I wouldn't worry too terribly much about the stability. From my experience it will be plenty stable for doing development.

Anon

I would agree with Craig, I have been using this setup for a couple months now using the ISAPI module and it's very stable

Anon

My production server runs RedHat 7, PHP4, MySQL and Apache. Like the other people who posted, I wanted a portable version for doing off-line development, so I installed (on my Windows 98 laptop), PHP4 (the CGI version. I couldn't get the dll version to work), MySQL, and Apache. I've been using them daily for a few weeks now and haven't had any problems. In fact, I think the only one that's crashed has been MySQL.

You can get the static binaries of each from their homepages (php.net, apache.org, mysql.com). There are also preconfigured distributions like NuSphere MySQL (nusphere.com). We use that on our RedHat systems and I have a friend who tried it on his WinNT desktop.

It's very cool, too, BTW. My productivity has gone up quite a bit now that I have a portable system for developing dynamic sites.

plutarck

I finally broke down and decided to get an offline way of programming with PHP, MySQL, and Apache. However I'm just not in the mood to get everything working seperately.

So this is a free program I reccommend with upmost confidence:

www.nusphere.com

It really is incredible. I use it on a windows 98 desktop (350mhz, 64mb ram) and I could not possibly be more happy with it.

All you do is download it, and execute the file. The first time I ran it it worked perfectly.

I've now set up MySQL to fit the usernames and passwords of my production server, and my file setup to mirror it also, and I don't even have to change a single variable to go from online to offline work.

When your done just insert the file you want to look at under your apache/htdocs folder and load up http://localhost/

You really should try installing everything from scratch for practice, but if you just want to program this is the quickest way to do it.

Took me 20-30 minutes for everything to work without a hitch.