Following from my previous post, i decided to try and mimick my development environment at work on my laptop. The quickest and easiest way to do this is to install XAMPP for Linux. The folks over at apachefriends have given us one of the greatest gifts a web-developer geek could want… A pre-configured, fully open and customizable, versatile setup of LAMPP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl). Here’s what the package includes:

Apache 2.2.11, MySQL 5.1.30, PHP 5.2.8 & PEAR + SQLite 2.8.17/3.3.17 + multibyte (mbstring) support, Perl 5.10.0, ProFTPD 1.3.1, phpMyAdmin 3.1.1, OpenSSL 0.9.8i, GD 2.0.1, Freetype2 2.1.7, libjpeg 6b, libpng 1.2.12, gdbm 1.8.0, zlib 1.2.3, expat 1.2, Sablotron 1.0, libxml 2.7.2, Ming 0.3, Webalizer 2.01, pdf class 009e, ncurses 5.3, mod_perl 2.0.4, FreeTDS 0.63, gettext 0.11.5, IMAP C-Client 2004e, OpenLDAP (client) 2.3.11, mcrypt 2.5.7, mhash 0.8.18, eAccelerator 0.9.5.3, cURL 7.19.2, libxslt 1.1.8, phpSQLiteAdmin 0.2, libapreq 2.08, FPDF 1.6, XAMPP Control Panel 0.6, bzip 1.0.5, PBXT 1.0.07-rc

Now stick that in your pipe and serve it!

This package must NOT be used on production server. NEVER! Please view this page for information about LAMPP’s inherent security flaws and why it benefits you on a local machine, but not on a production server.

The LAMPP package is simple enough to install, but there is one thing i noticed that is a bit of a ball-ache… By default, you cannot use LAMPP without an active internet connection. However, there is a quick fix:

  1. Open the httpd.conf file (sudo nano /path/to/httpd.conf)
  2. Look for the line that says Listen 80
  3. Change the line to Listen 127.0.0.1:80
  4. Save the file and restart apache
  5. Run http://localhost
  6. It works! :)