Setup easy web development environment (XAMPP)

This is a how-to for setting up a web development environment easily. This guide will install the XAMPP lampp stack into /opt, setup an easy way to start it up and shut it down, and link a folder in your home directory to the webserver.

WARNING
This guide is aimed at a development environment only and should not be used as a public webserver. To setup a public webserver follow the directions on the Ubuntu wiki https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP

As this is Ubuntu, all the major parts of a typical web server are included (in the main repo, or on the Ubuntu Server CD) and this is a great way to setup a server. The ubuntu developers have prepared a great web server and have made the process as seemless as possible.

But what if even the official way is still to complicated? What if you just want a quick web server for development?

Fortunately there is the XAMPP project: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. The XAMPP project bundles Apache, PHP4 & 5, Perl, mySQL, and a bunch of other utilities/applications into an simple package for Mac OSX, Windows, Solaris, and Linux. Obviously this HOWTO only deals with the linux version.

For those of you with already existing Apache/mySQL/php installations it installs everything into /opt so it doesn't conflict with any other installation, and it is completely setup and ready to run.

Install XAMPP

Two easy steps:

1. Download the most recent version of XAMPP: (at time of writing 1.5.3a)
   http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/xampp/xampp-linux-1.5.3a.tar.gz?download
   (Source URL: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html#374)
2. Extract the archive to /opt using sudo: (make sure you are in the directory that you downloaded the archive to)
   sudo tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.5.3a.tar.gz -C /opt

Start XAMPP

To start it up, open a terminal and type this:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

Stop XAMPP

To stop it, open a terminal and type this:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp stop

Additional XAMPP commands

To see additional commands, open a terminal and type this:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp

Sweet XAMPP Control Panel



To use the sweet gtk/python control panel:

Run in a terminal:

gedit ~/.local/share/applications/xampp-control-panel.desktop

Paste the following into the open file and save and exit.

[Desktop Entry]
Comment=Start/Stop XAMPP
Name=XAMPP Control Panel
Exec=gksudo "python /opt/lampp/share/xampp-control-panel/xampp-control-panel.py"
Icon[en_CA]=/usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/devices/network-wired.svg
Encoding=UTF-8
Terminal=false
Name[en_CA]=XAMPP Control Panel
Comment[en_CA]=Start/Stop XAMPP
Type=Application
Icon=/usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/devices/network-wired.svg

"XAMPP Control Panel" will show up in your applications menu under Internet. Use the Alacarte Menu Editor to move it around.

Test to see if XAMPP is running

Once XAMPP is up and running open firefox and go to: http://localhost/

You should see the XAMPP test page:



Location of files and uploading

XAMPP by default uses /opt/lampp/htdocs as the root web directory. The easiest way to start working on files is to link a folder in your home directory into this directory.
My user name is peter so I have /home/peter/public_html linked to /opt/lampp/htdocs/peter. So if I navigate to http://localhost/peter/ I get a listing of all the files/folders in that directory. (As long is there isn't a index.php/html/etc file)
To set this up, run in a terminal:

1. Make public_html directory in home directory:
   mkdir ~/public_html
2. Link to /opt/lampp/htdocs
   sudo ln -s ~/public_html /opt/lampp/htdocs/$USER

Now any files and folders you place in ~/public_html will be published to your personal webserver.

Bookmark http://localhost/username to make this easy to access.

WARNING - SECURITY
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html#381
Open holes:

1. The MySQL administrator (root) has no password.
2. The MySQL daemon is accessible via network.
3. ProFTPD uses the password "lampp" for user "nobody".
4. PhpMyAdmin is accessible via network.
5. Examples are accessible via network.
6. MySQL and Apache running under the same user (nobody).

This doesn't leave your whole system wide open, but someone could hack your XAMPP installation, so be wary.
To fix most of the security weaknesses open a terminal and run:

 sudo /opt/lampp/lampp security