XAMPP on the Mac

Last time we did 9713 it was not possible for students to access the web server so they could not copy their project there (for some security reason). We ended up uploading them to the class sharepoint. This time around we are thinking maybe we bypass this by using XAMPP 1.7.3 for the mac. There may be some issues:

The windows version which works on any drive as long as the xampp folder is in the root, so c:\xampp, e:\xampp, f:\xampp all work - in fact you can have multiple different copies of xampp on the same machine, a cheap version of the dev,qat,prd server model for development. The same process also works for xampplite and xampp and xampplite can be on the same drive as they have different folders. This is actually very useful as you can really play around without worrying about losing work.

Anyway, unfortunately the mac xampp version only works when installed to Applications. So we have to test this on lab machines and see what happens. Once installed you click the XAMPP control panel and start the apache,mySQL and even the ftp server. Of course, since you have access to the console you don't really need to ftp.

The students would then copy their content to the /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs folder and access them with Safari at http://localhost or depending on the lab setup they might be able to put their web content in their Home folder and goto http://localhost~username but i doubt if that has been set up.

We shall see...