Exercise 01.01

Preparing your Development Environment

During the course of this class you will be using two different PHP environments. The first is your development environment, this is where you will do the exercises from the book and prepare your homework programming assignmnets. Your second environment, production, will be where you upload your assignments for grading.

Most companies use a multi-environment set up. Code gets developed on individual programmer's machines, then integrated with other's work, then the Quality Assurance engineers need to ensure the application performs its functions correctly, the application needs to be analyzed to ensure it performs well when it is being used by a large number of users and finally the application gets installed in the "production" environment for end users to access it.

Typical environments found in professional development:

• development - often an individual developer's machine
• development integration - a shared enviroment where multiple developer will work together to ensure code is compatible with each other's work.
• quality assurance (QA) - integrated code is pubilshed (or promoted) to this environment for functional testing by the QA team.
• performance tuning - after code is approved to be functional, it is promoted to this testing environment to ensure that it performs well.
• production - the live site where the end users access the web application.

Not all companies use all of these environments, some will use additional. At my current company we use the development, quality assurance and production environments. When I worked for Charles Schwab, we used all five of those listed above.

The goal of the set up of your development environment is to mimic the design of the production environment. In this you will be getting MySQL, Apache and PHP installed and then configuring it. The following instructions will result in a working development environment.

Start by following the text book's instructions to install MySQL, Apache and PHP (Chapters 1-4). If you are using Windows Vista, I recommend that you diable User Account Control before editing the httpd.conf or php.ini files, this will save you a lot of headaches. See Disable User Account Control (UAC) the Easy Way on Windows Vista for how to do it or Google "disable user account control" Then follow these instructions to customize your environment.

1. Create your user directory
   • Create a directory structure "websites\santarosa.edu\student" in the c:\ directory on Windows, or on Mac/Linux an appropriate location, such as /opt.
   • Create a directory using your username (this is the username the student.santarosa.edu server assigned to you, if you haven't created your Student Server account [if you created one in a previeous class your account should still exist], STOP, go to http://student.santarosa.edu/ and create your Student Server account) in the websites\santarosa.edu\student directory. This is your "user directory".
     
2. Configure the Apache server
   • Edit C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\httpd.conf
     • Ensure the line LoadModule userdir_module modules/mod_userdir.so is un-commented.
     • Adjusting the directory paths to match your operating system, append (at the end of the file) the following:

       Listen 8080
       <VirtualHost *:8080>
           DocumentRoot c:/websites/santarosa.edu/student
           UserDir c:/websites/santarosa.edu/student
       </VirtualHost>
       
       <Directory "c:/websites/santarosa.edu/student">
           Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
           AllowOverride None
           Order allow,deny
           Allow from all
       </Directory>

       Please be sure to leave the Listen 80 directive intact.
     • Locate the "DirectoryIndex" directive and change it to DirectoryIndex index.php index.shtml index.html.
   • Test the httpd.conf file , correct any reported errors.
   • Restart the Apache server
3. Open a browser and load the URL: http://127.0.0.1:8080/~{your user name}/ . You should get a directory listing looking like:
4. Now you will create individual project directories for each of the assignments for class.
5. First create a "2009fall/cs5513" folder in your user directory.
6. Then in the "cs5513" create a folder for each assignment, named "assn01" through "assn18".
7. When you work on your homework assignments, use the associated directory.
8. Point yout browser to http://127.0.0.1:8080/~{your user name}/2009fall/cs5513/ (please note that in some of these screen shots, I'm using port 9010, it's because I have another server already using port 8080) and you should see something like this:
9. Take a screen shot of your browser, you will turn it in as part of your homework.
10. Now we will fine tune your PHP configuration.
    • Open the phi.ini file for editing (see page 73 of the book for the file location).
    • Locate the "display_errors" directive and set its value to "On". Note: This setting is for development only and should be left as "Off" for production sites.
11. Final testing of your development environment.
    • In your "assn01" directory create a file named "phpinfo.php".
    • make the file contents be:

      <?php phpinfo(); ?>

    • Point your browser to http://localhost:8080/~{yourusername}/2009fall/cs5513/assn01/phpinfo.php
    • Take a screen shot of your browser, you will turn it in as part of your homework.