Question

Hi I’m a newbie to web programming and am trying to build an integrated FB application in PHP. I have already some some sample code stored on the heroku servers but for convenience I am trying to set up a local development environment and have installed WAMP (I’m running Windows 7 32-bit). I have three questions:

1) I have been following the instructions on https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/facebook#working_locally and am in the process of setting up the developer test app. It seems that the localhost url is always 127.0.0.1 for every machine, but how can I find out what port number to put? Or do I simply pick a 4 digit one at random? In another post someone specified a port for Ruby (or Ruby on Rails, I’m not sure), but I can’t find any information on the port for PHP.

2) The guide mentions that I need to set the APP ID and APP secret as environment variables – how do I do this in WAMP?

3) Once I have created the test app, how do I actually go about working locally?

Help with any of these questions is much appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

• You don’t need to specify a port, the default is 80 for HTTP which PHP uses.

The guide mentions that I need to set the APP ID and APP secret as environment variables – how do I do this in WAMP?

• Hopefully WAMP is like XAMPP so you should find your vhosts file equivalent and enter the following

  <VirtualHost *:80>
      DocumentRoot /Users/adam/Sites/mycoolapp-dev
      ServerName mycoolapp-dev.localhost
      SetEnv FACEBOOK_APP_ID 964173273189
      SetEnv FACEBOOK_SECRET dcd5d23d003d53cb2b68e01
  </VirtualHost>
  

Something like C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf should be the location. So you’ll need to read up on Virtual Hosts for this to work, if you encounter errors

Once I have created the test app, how do I actually go about working locally?

• You code and save, and either create a new test app different from the one pushed to Heroku in your app settings or change the URLs in the original app settings to match your localhost URL. If everything is set your app should be able to work locally.