Recommendations for replacing xampp

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I am rebuilding my development environment on a new Windows 8 system. When I went to download xampp for my apache/mysql/php local server I discovered that the latest distribution include Mariadb instead of mySQL. I could use an old version of XAMPP but it includes an old version of PHP and I would prefer to be using a newer version of PHP to insure compatible with Concrete5.7 and beyond.

Can anyone recommend a replacement for xampp? I like the product and I assume I can run a local version of mySQL but that might introduce configuration issues when I move files from the development environment to my production system.

Any suggestions or recommendations are appreciated.

 
ramonleenders replied on at Permalink Reply
ramonleenders
Install VirtualBox or VMWare to run something with command line (Linux/Ubuntu). Then do your development there. Windows is quite slow for developing. You can also do awesome bash scripting.
dgreer replied on at Permalink Reply
I've not have any problems with speed while developing on windows. I would also like to make this simple. At this point I need to redo my site in Concrete5.7 or 5.8 when it is ready. I've built quite a few proprietary blocks and templates. This is already a big undertaking.

Thanks for your suggestion.
JohntheFish replied on at Permalink Reply
JohntheFish
Mariadb is a fork of MySQL and is the default DB on many web servers that run concrete5. It is also the DB on many linux based dev systems. If you only access it through the c5 API, you won't run into any compatibility issues.
dgreer replied on at Permalink Reply
A few of my blocks access proprietary tables. At times I backup these tables from the production server and move them to my development server to keep this data in sync in both environments. It sounds like I should not face any problems backing up and restoring the tables. Do you think this will continue to be the case as MariaDB develops? I understand that MariaDB is a fork, but at some point there may be changes that cause incompatibilities between MySQL and MariaDB.

I have seen discussions regarding MariaDB in the Concrete5 forums. I gather that the developers of Concrete5 have decided to stay with MySQL at this point. Is that true or should we all be looking to move to MariaDB in the near future?
ob7dev replied on at Permalink Reply
ob7dev
Usually, I run mariaDB installed with apt-get, as John said its the standard with linux based environments (which accounts for most web servers in the world I believe).

If an app I was using required a newer version of mySQL than available in the Linux repo's, then I would download and install it manually from Oracle, but between the two I can not tell. Both always work fine.

As for replacing XAMPP: On a Linux machine, we don't install a single program like XAMP or MAMP that runs everything, you just set your local machine up to run a web server (locally). So you install whatever you need, and in the case of XAMP (uniX, Apache, Mysql, Php), you install apache, then mysql and php. Usually everything is set up to run automatically when you boot up. So you don't need to open up a program and click start to get things running. If you were to start it manually you would run the respective command to do so. Therefore in the case of Windows, perhaps you can set it up in a similar fashion? Install them separately and configure it as a server? But then again that might be quite a pain outside a Unix system hence easy to just use XAMPP with Windows. My suggestion for any web developer would be to install Linux and wean off Windows. Unless you need to run 3DS Max, but thats not a web developer thing. EDIT: Just learned about Blender, so no need for 3DS Max or Windows.
ramonleenders replied on at Permalink Reply
ramonleenders
Yup, no more starting your WAMP/XXAMP indeed. And you can install multiple PHP versions too and switch whenever you like. Install cURL or whatever other PHP extensions you need from command line, quite a breeze.

With WAMP, and other similar programms, you will have to use some kind of workaround for most of the stuff. It works for most, but if you can... Linux based systems are Heaven for real developers. The freedom you want (and need).
ob7dev replied on at Permalink Reply
ob7dev
You've probably seen this before:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njos57IJf-0...

Gotta love it when HAL9000 shows up as Linux. My favorite part is "beat you in seventeen lines of code"... lol.
CrewBoss replied on at Permalink Reply
CrewBoss
I'm using a one click install from Bitnami that has MySQL and PHP 5.6.24
https://bitnami.com/stack/concrete5...
mnakalay replied on at Permalink Reply
mnakalay
I used to work with Xampp. I switched to WampServer (http://www.wampserver.com/en/) last year and never looked back.

Among the options it has that I use all the time:
- you can install several versions of PHP and select one from the interface so it's just a click to go from 5.6 to 7 to run some tests
- you can create virtual hosts also from the interface in a click so instead of localhost/something I can now have something.dev or whatever I want. And that will also make all my sites available in a click from Wamp's interface

It's really compact and easy to use with almost everything available in a few clicks.
mnakalay replied on at Permalink Reply
mnakalay
Wamp and Xampp both allow you to install all elements (PHP, mysql...) as a service and to have it all start automatically so no need to click anything and you can use the command line if you want.
dgreer replied on at Permalink Reply
Thanks for the recommendation. I will take a look at Wamp along with the other suggestions of installing and running the services separately. The Wamp options sounds like the best bet at this point.