XAMPP or alts for maintenance and testing?...

[latrodectus]

Hoping this is the right board for this...

I was looking into ways to local modify or test upgrades/new plugins or whatever. After installing XAMPP and having a terrible time with it the first go around; ended up having to boot in safe mode just to get it to uninstall. I thought maybe the first installation just went bad after spending hours going through Stackoverflow and some Reddit cases similar to mine and having no luck with those fixes. Anyways, I decided to uninstall and reinstall in hopes for that to be my savior... NOPE. Now the services for Apache and MySQL won't even start. I don't quite have the patience for this although I would really like to use XAMPP.

So my question is: What do you use? Are there alternatives that are less complex? Or do you just do everything live?

My biggest fear is having performed changes to any of my boards only for the changes to completely crap everything out (especially software updates) and having to fix everything on a live board while guessing.

 

[Cedric]

I had to do some look up, but here goes.

One thing you can try is to check the error logs for Apache and MySQL to see if they provide any clues as to what's causing the services to fail to start. These logs are typically located in the "logs" folder within the XAMPP installation directory.
Another thing you can try is to run the XAMPP Control Panel as an administrator, sometimes that can fix the problem.
Another way you can try to fix it is by reinstalling the XAMPP with the latest version and also ensuring that no other services that may be using the same ports as Apache and MySQL are running while you try to start these services in XAMPP.

If none of these solutions work, you may want to consider using a different local development environment such as WAMP or LAMP instead of XAMPP.

There are a few alternatives to XAMPP that you can use for local development, depending on your needs. Some popular options include:

• WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) - similar to XAMPP, but only works on Windows
• LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) - similar to XAMPP, but uses Linux as the operating system
• MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP) - similar to XAMPP, but only works on MacOS

All of these alternatives provide similar functionality to XAMPP, but may be easier to set up and use, depending on your experience level.

Another option is using virtualization software such as VirtualBox or VMware to set up a virtual machine with a Linux distribution that has LAMP or LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL and PHP) stack pre-installed, like Ubuntu or Debian. This can provide more flexibility and control over your development environment, but may be more complex to set up and manage.

A last option would be to use a cloud-based development environment such as Cloud9, Codeanywhere, or repl.it, which allow you to work on your code in a browser and run it on a remote server. This is an easy solution and you don't have to worry about server setup, but you may have limitations in terms of access to server configurations and resources.

Ultimately, the choice of which local development environment to use will depend on your specific needs and preferences.

 

[Naiwen]

I have never used it before personally but wouldn’t mind trying it.

 

[Arantor]

I'm a lot more out there but I'll try to describe what I have set up.

So I'm on Windows, but I use Docker which is sort of like the VM setup - in that each site gets a virtual machine of a sort to play with - but they're much less footprint than a fully blown VM in general. (Especially on Linux where that's much more true. But I'm on Windows Pro with Hyper-V so I get generally decent performance etc.)

This way I isolate each site into its own Docker container where it has the things it needs, whether that's specific PHP libraries or extensions, and I have containers for MySQL which live outside and are shared across all the different sites I have.

What this also means is that I can do things with PHP versions; I have super old versions of things kicking around for reference purposes, and I can give them PHP 4 if they want it without worrying about other sites that want PHP 8. Or even not PHP at all, I've successfully run Discourse in this setup before now.

If you're on a Mac, I'd generally encourage people to use Laravel Valet, it's a one stop shop for low-effort running of sites locally, we use it for everything at work, but if you have a wide enough range of things, Laravel Sail might be a better fit to use Docker containers.

I will say that Docker stuff isn't entirely for the faint of heart as it comes with a very annoying learning curve (you will run into 'what does localhost mean' issues where each thing has a different idea of what localhost means and none of them what you think it means) but it's super super versatile. My current dev environment has running instances of vB 3/4/5, IPS 4, XF 2.2, SMF 1.0/1.1/2.0/2.1, WoltLab 5.x, Flarum, and it's also been host to projects with Moodle, Mahara, Jekyll, Hugo, Canvas, Discourse and some other stuff over the year.

 

[latrodectus]

I had to do some look up, but here goes.

One thing you can try is to check the error logs for Apache and MySQL to see if they provide any clues as to what's causing the services to fail to start. These logs are typically located in the "logs" folder within the XAMPP installation directory.
Another thing you can try is to run the XAMPP Control Panel as an administrator, sometimes that can fix the problem.
Another way you can try to fix it is by reinstalling the XAMPP with the latest version and also ensuring that no other services that may be using the same ports as Apache and MySQL are running while you try to start these services in XAMPP.

I ended up opening it with run as administrator which allowed me to completely stop the services but still couldn't uninstall them. After getting frustrated I took a walk/hike and ended up having the idea to boot in safe mode and try to uninstall that way.

Booting in safe mode fixed all of my problems, I was able to completely uninstall all services and the application. HOWEVER I couldn't touch the folder "xampp", it wouldn't allow me to delete it.

So I ended up messing with security permissions and taking ownership of the folder with my user account and then was able to delete it.

After having a cow (almost literally) I then decided to reinstall XAMPP after looking into the other options and coming to the conclusion I'd just try it again. Reinstall and bam everything works as it should.

What this also means is that I can do things with PHP versions; I have super old versions of things kicking around for reference purposes, and I can give them PHP 4 if they want it without worrying about other sites that want PHP 8. Or even not PHP at all, I've successfully run Discourse in this setup before now.

This actually seems super useful and I'll look into this for sure! Thank you for the suggestion!