Category: Web Development

Installing Apache on 64-bit Windows

0. Download

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679 and download Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 (VC11) which is needed for the next step. Double-click and install it.

1. Download

Go to http://www.apachelounge.com/download/and download the 64-bit version (httpd-2.4.12-win64-VC11.zip)

2. Unzip
Unzip the Apache24 folder to c:/Apache24 (that is the ServerRoot in the config).
Default folder for your your webpages is DocumentRoot “c:/Apache24/htdocs”

When you unzip to another location, change ServerRoot, Documenroot, Directories, ScriptAlias in httpd.conf. Also, when you use the extra folder config files, change to your location there as well.

3. Install Apache as a service
Start > cmd (Run as Administrator)
c:\Apache24\bin>httpd.exe -k install

4. Install ApacheMonitor
Right-click on c:\Apache24\bin\ApacheMonitor.exe, Run as Administrator,
Make a shortcut of ApacheMonitor and put it in your Startup folder.

4. Test Setup
Go to http://localhost and you should see “It works”.

5. If you already have configuration files from a previous installation that you would like to apply to this new installation, do the following:
– rename C:/Apache24/conf/httpd.conf to httpd-original.conf
– rename C:/Apache24/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf to httpd-vhosts-original.conf
– rename C:/Apache24/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf to httpd-ssl-original.conf
– rename old C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts file to hosts-original

6. copy and paste the config files from your old installation into the new installation
C:/Apache24/conf/9264078_local.dev.XXXX.com.cert (SSL cert)
C:/Apache24/conf/9264078_local.dev.XXXX.com.key (SSL key)
C:/Apache24/conf/httpd.conf
C:/Apache24/conf/server.crt (SSL cert)
C:/Apache24/conf/server.nopassword.key (SSL key)
C:/Apache24/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
C:/Apache24/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

7. Some useful (necessary) settings to have in httpd.conf

• LoadModule php5_module “C:/php-5.6.5-Win32-VC11-x64/php5apache2_4.dll”
• LoadFile “C:\php-5.6.5-Win32-VC11-x64\libpq.dll”
• PHPIniDir “C:\php-5.6.5-Win32-VC11-x64”
• DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
• AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
• Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
• Include conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

Continue reading Installing Apache, PHP, and Postgres on Windows 7 64 Bit

I can’t stand using Putty for SSH on Windows. It’s ugly and very non user-friendly. I even got a Mac laptop which I often use for just SSH using Mac Terminal. But, yesterday I discovered mRemoteNG from a coworker, which is a wrapper to Putty, supports tabs, and offers a much better overall SSH experience from Windows. If you need a terminal on Windows, I’d recommend Putty + mRemoteNG. Learn more and download at

http://www.mremoteng.org/

In addition, to fix the ugly color scheme that comes with Putty, use one of these custom themes.

http://www.igvita.com/2008/04/14/custom-putty-color-themes/

Instead of specifically writing string manipulation code that is multibyte-safe, e.g. mb_substr() instead of substr(), you can configure PHP to do this automatically.  Just update the following lines in your php.ini.

mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
mbstring.func_overload = 7
mbstring.strict_detection = On
zend.multibyte = On
zend.script_encoding = UTF-8

mbstring.func_overload will automatically cause any non-multibyte-safe functions to use their multibyte-safe counterparts.

When determining the URL for a web page, you often want to use keywords that accurately describe the page’s content. Sometimes, these keywords aren’t in English and contain accented characters. One thing you can do is choose one URL to be the canonical URL and create a redirect to that URL from another that contains the ascii-equivalent version of the words, e.g.

Canonical: http://www.somedomain.com/nǐhǎo

Redirects:

• http://www.somedomain.com/nihao
• http://www.somedomain.com/你好

1. Generated a server certificate and server private key

http://www.selfsignedcertificate.com/

2. Download the files, e.g.

9264078_local.dev.mydomain.com.cert
9264078_local.dev.mydomain.com.key

and put them in your Apache conf folder, e.g. C:Apache24conf

Continue reading Adding Self-Signed SSL For Local Web Development with https Auto-Redirect

If you’ve installed Apache on Windows and are used to (re)starting the Apache service from a GUI interface, you’ll have a hard time debugging errors in your httpd configuration files, if there are any, since the GUI response will simply say

“The requested operation has failed!”

Continue reading Fixing Apache Errors on Windows

Here’s a good word to use to test if your files are UTF-8 -encoded and support international characters.

Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

For more information about UTF-8 character encoding, visit

• http://htmlpurifier.org/docs/enduser-utf8.html
• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

If you’re on a Mac and want to connect to another computer over SSH via your Terminal, you can create a shortcut so that instead of typing

> ssh server1.ops.somedomain.com

you can just enter

> ssh server1

Continue reading Mac: Creating Shortcut Host Names When Connecting Over SSH in Terminal

If you update your hosts file to point a domain to another location, accessing that domain will take you to your new destination. For example, in Windows, your hosts file is at

C:WindowsSystem32driversetchosts

If you add the following:

127.0.0.1 www.google.com

and then open your browser and go to www.google.com, you will not see Google’s home page but rather your local host index page.  This can be handy when you want to disable one javascript include in a page that you don’t have access to. By pointing the external javascript domain to your local host, a 404 not found will be triggered which will prevent the code from running. Everything else, including other references to external javascript files,  in the page will still continue to execute.