Anyone who has worked as a professional Web designer or developer will swear by having a test server on a machine for checking scripts, browser compatibility, and general site flow. SVS not only makes a development environment like this possible, it adds a level of coolness your LAMP buddies can only imagine.

Most Web developers have their development machine set up to do this using AMPP or Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl. But setting up AMPP can be a pain sometimes, especially if you want full control over the install that the pre-built packages don't always offer. There are also times when you have access to your scripts but not to your test environment so your choices are a) installing everything onto a machine where you are or b) just working without the ability to test. I've personally had this dilemma pop up more times then I'd like, which is where SVS comes in.

All the programs in AMPP are open source so I can just carry VSAs of them around in my thumb drive with the Web sites as well as SVS to install on a computer. It cuts down the time needed to set up AMPP exponentially. Best of all, you can remove the layers and SVS in a matter of seconds and you don't have to worry what Apache, Perl or anything else left behind -- -pretty cool way to show the owner of the machine you're using how cool SVS is.

This is also a good chance to show how someone might set up an environment such as AMPP in SVS, where multiple programs interact with each other as well as excludes and data layers. Here's a list of all the layers I've included:

Program layers:

• Apache Server 2.0.59
• MySQL 5.0.27
• PHP 4.4.6
• PHP 5.2.1
• PHPMyAdmin 2.10.01 (though this could also be a datalayer I guess)
• Python 2.5

Data Layers

• databases (captures the folder \MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0
• htdocs (captures the folder \Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs)

Setup

All of these programs are using the defaults that are provided by their various vendors (so PHP 4 and 5 are using PHP.ini-recommended) so you can easily go in and make changes.

MySQL is also set to the default and has no password assigned to it (figured that would be easier then using root in this instance). All the programs are installed in the default directory paths (so c:\PHP, Program Files\Apache Group, etc). I could have easily set up PHP 4 and 5 to run at the same time under Apache (and is something anyone can still do if they wish) but I set them up as separate "versions" where only one can be active at the same time to demonstrate how SVS handles situations where you do have different versions installed on the same system. To do this I placed Apache's http.conf file in the PHP layers. Both PHP 4 and 5 have their own http.conf that points back to them and the required DLLs. They also place their DLLs needed for running in the Windows system32 directory instead of using the Path variable due to how earlier versions of SVS handles the Path (it works for the next release but not for the current release or beta).

The datalayers are set up to capture anything placed in their folders. For databases it's \MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0. The MySQL layer has an exclude entry for that same folder so when any new data is generated it's captured in the data layer (if active). I have a test database named datalayer to demonstrate this though the regular default databases that come with MySQL are in the MySQL layer from the install. This is easy to change but any changes made to them will go to the datalayer.

The second datalayer is htdocs which is the name of the folder that Apache uses for its Web services (or localhost in this case) and its set to capture anything saved in that folder.

Lastly is phpMyAdmin which is a PHP-based program for managing databases. While this can easily be installed in a datalayer because it's just text files that PHP processes and not a compiled program that needs access to the registry, I installed it as a program to show it can be done this way as well.

Click to view.

If you want to see more about how datalayers work and how to set up excludes for them you can read Scott's great article, An Example Config for Excludes and Data Layers.

Usage

Since these programs are virtualized in SVS they run as they would if they were installed to the base with one exception, one of the PHP layers needs to be active before Apache is started since the PHP layers contain Apache's config file and it can't run without it. I would set all the layers but Apache to auto-activate then manually start that one, or if you want to mess with layer priorities you can set PHP to activate before Apache and that should work as well. To switch between PHP versions you will need to stop and start (or restart) the Apache service since you need to reload the config file that the new PHP version contains.

Known Issues

Unfortunately at this time PHP 5 does not work with MySQL. I have not been able to figure out the reason why, so if anyone has any ideas, post them in the comments section and I'll fix it. Also, for Python and Perl, their Apache mod files are not installed. I'm not really sure this is a problem since for a test machine you really don't need it because the scripts will still run. It's something to note just in case.