By shiva7663 on

I'd like to set up my (WinXP) dev machine to be able to work on several completely independent Drupal 6 projects at once.

  • I'd like to only have one copy of my basic technology stack (in this case, XAMPP v2.7.1). No external access allowed.
  • Under the htdocs folder, a separate Drupal folder for each project.
  • In mysql, a separate database for each project (named to make it obvious which Drupal project it is for).

Are there any implications to this plan that I may be missing? The way I did it before was to install the technology stack many times, but that was becoming unwieldy. Likewise, a classic multisite install of Drupal 6 seems needlessly complex for what I'm trying to do.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

dbeall’s picture

dbeall commented

I know your post talks about xamp.. I just thought I would say how easy the wamp set up is.
I think I have 10 drupal test sites and 4 other sites I work on in wamp.
To set up a new site is easy, just add another folder in the C:\wamp\www directory and add a database in the phpmyadmin.
The whole deal only takes about 2 minutes to add a separate site. The wamp task bar icon makes navigation easy.
Often times I have many of the sites open at the same time..
If you use wamp, I recommend grabbing a copy from source forge with php 5.2*
I think 1.7.4 will work..
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wampserver/files/WAMP5/

shiva7663’s picture

shiva7663 commented

XAMPP 2.7.1 is the most recent distribution that still uses PHP 5.2.x. I thought about getting the current XAMPP and downgrading the PHP to a version appropriate to Drupal 6, but have not found advice on the Apache Friends support forum that deals with that case. Quite a while ago, they had a PHP version switcher feature that swapped between PHP4 and PHP5, but they don't use that any more, so I'm not certain I could adapt that old functionality to swap between PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3.

dbeall’s picture

dbeall commented

the problem is for me at least, it's too much messing around compared to the wamp set up.
I guess I am busy working on sites and don't need to play with getting things to work..
I have nothing against xamp and do use it for fun once in a while..

shiva7663’s picture

shiva7663 commented

I'd rather not have this discussion devolve into a technology stack war. I'm more interested in the other implications of my original post than the trivia of what stack I'm running.

dbeall’s picture

dbeall commented

as I had said, use what you like. I am not a server admin. Xamp is just fine, you can add as many sites as you want with it too. I know many of the developers use xamp.

shiva7663’s picture

shiva7663 commented

Ok, the procedure is pretty easy; I'll see if it's OK in my current project, in case some gotcha rears its ugly head.

  1. Copy the entire Drupal template folder hierarchy to a new folder. Rename the new folder as needed.
  2. Use phpMyAdmin to copy the template database to a new database (make a note of the new name).
  3. Edit settings.php in the new project's sites/all folder to reflect the new database name.
  4. Edit User 1's account to change the username and password.
  5. Update Administer > Site configuration > Site information.