Xampp Win 10 Localhost advice for beginner IPS development

[The Old Man]

Hi folks,

I've been playing around with Xampp on Windows 10 Home this weekend so I can follow some beginner dev tutorials. So far, I've found 427 ways not to do it! The local host test install guidance section here is basic and seems only enough to get you started but doesn't cover the task Cron side of things when running a localhost.

So after a month or so, I've now given up on using an older spare PC on my home LAN as my XAMPP server, as MS seem to have killed off network shares and mapped drives in favour of pushing shared cloud drive storage. You can create them but you can't access them even on the same machine after a few reboots!

Instead I've now set up XAMPP on my main Windows 10 PC. I've got PHP and phpMyAdmin working with MariaDB etc.

My first install of IPS with licencekey-testinstall started off okay but as soon as I got into the 4.2.7 AdminCP and entered the key, all the CSS styling and images disappeared within a minute or so! D'Oh!

I figured I needed to correct the file paths but then thought twice, because everything was fine for those few minutes.

It then dawned on me to configure a Cron task, so I added the suggested Cron task to a .bat file in Notepad and found a way to set it up to run every minute or so (via Windows Task Scheduler). However it didn't fix the missing images and CSS, no matter how many times I ran the support tool.

There's obviously a lot of developers here, so I was wondering if anyone has any XAMPP tips in terms of IPS on a localhost, and what you use in respect of the maintenance tasks aspect, whilst writing your hooks and apps?

Do you just use the basic task configuration option (which I'm thinking doesn't have enough user activity with just me online as the Admin) to drive the essential tasks to make it all function, or do you set up a scheduled Windows task? If so, do you use the url it provides with the Web style Cron service method or the usual Cron path method?

I'm determined to make my first plug-in, a small step on the road to making my first app!

Many thanks! 

[bfarber]

I use WAMP personally, but the principles will be the same.

I would suggest verifying for your paths you use forward slashes (/) instead of backslashes (\). I know this seems "wrong" on Windows, but Apache/PHP/MySQL understand it just fine, and it can prevent problems in my experience.

[The Old Man]

Thanks Brandon, I really appreciate that hint. I recall I did see a mixture of forward and back slashes.

[The Old Man]

In case anyone else comes across this problem, I found out why all my CSS and images disappeared on my localhost setup.

I did a full new localhost install, everything was fine (aside from the license key message in the AdminCP homepage). When I clicked on the recommendation to remove write permissions for folders in the AdminCP Security tab, and then reloaded the index page, everything was gone again! So it seems to be the Windows folder permissions being changed in terms of running the site on Apache via XAMPP or the permissions being too restrictive.

[Daniel F]

You clicked on remove write permission and everything was gone?Wow, I hear this for the first time.

Since it's your local dev environment I would suggest to ignore the recommendations.

 

[The Old Man]

Thanks Daniel, yes, local dev environment on Windows 10 Home. I've been unticking the Read Only Attribute for files and sub folders but it seems to keep resetting back to Readonly.