By orthoducks on

I have installed Drupal 5.7 (with Windows XP, Apache 2.2.8, MySQL 5.0.51a, PHP 5.2.5) and got it to work. Later I installed phpMyAdmin, and it blew up. I found that while Drupal's installation instructions told me to set session.save_handler to "user," phpMyAdmin requires it to be set to "files."

I tried to find a workaround for this, but I ended up chasing my tail. I'm new to PHP and Apache as well as Drupal, and every time I looked up a concept or technique the explanation referred to one or two other concepts or techniques that I didn't know, and had to look up. It's time to call for help.

What is a clean way to run Drupal and phpMyAdmin on the same computer?

I gather that Apache's <Directory> directive will let me change PHP settings for a single branch of the document tree, although it's not clear to me just how to make that work. Even if I can make it work, though, I'm uncomfortable with it for a couple of reasons. First, <Directory> apparently won't let me identify a directory relative to the document root; if I ever moved the root, I'd have to change all of the directives. Second, a directive which controls how PHP runs phpMyAdmin (or Drupal) belongs in the phpMyAdmin (or Drupal) directory, or if there's no other way, in the PHP directory. If I put it in the Apache directory I would be laying a land mine for myself to trip over later.

I've tried running Drupal with session.save_handler = files, and it seems to work, at least as far as displaying the home page. Perhaps this is a lot of fuss over nothing, and I should use "files" and be done with it. I don't know what trouble I might be setting myself up for later, though.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

Nailara’s picture

Nailara commented

It may help to configure two virtual server - one for drupal, one for phpMyAdmin. For every of the virtual server it is possible to configure different php-settings.

Please take a look to this pages:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/en/vhosts/name-based.html
http://ru2.php.net/manual/en/configuration.changes.php

Mathias

orthoducks’s picture

orthoducks commented

I'm reading the documentation for that technique, and it looks like it ought to work. However, I'm having trouble understanding how to define name-based virtual servers in a purely local environment, i.e., where all of my applications are addressed at localhost.

Must I configure a local DNS to make this work? If so, the solution promises to be more elaborate and difficult to achieve than it initially appears.

rjbrown99’s picture

rjbrown99 commented

Try this - in your apache/httpd.conf file, for the section dealing with whatever you need that requires a different save handler (Piwik and phpMyAdmin are two), add this:

<Directory /path/to/my/phpmyadmin>
php_value session.save_handler files
</Directory>

That will override it just for that but not for all of Drupal.

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