Question

I’m just starting to learn web dev, but got myself a bit confused when setting up my local development environment.

I had a php site on shared hosting for some time. I would edit local files and upload them, then refresh to ensure everything worked. A naughty practice I know!

So I have tried to set up a local dev environment and installed AMPPS for a local webserver (PHP5).
I have ambitiously set up the folder structure below so that I can code up a range of websites to try out different languages and frameworks whilst keeping them all seperate. (Square brackets denote folders). Note sure if this is the correct approach… (?)

-->[PHP]
---> [AMPPS]
----> [www]
-----> [PROJECTS]

------> [project_name]
-------> index.php
-------> .htaccess
-------> [images]
-------> [section1]
--------> page1.php
-------> [etc...]

------> [project_name]
------> [project_name]
--> [RUBY]
--> [PYTHON]

My first hurdle however is that all of my links were relative, and I had of course uploaded my site at root with my host. Root in my local dev enironment is now www, which as you can see is several folders up from where I have installed my site.

Links (e.g. <a href="/section1/page1.php">Page 1</a>) now display as: "localhost/section1/page1.php" when I believe they should in fact show as "localhost/PROJECTS/project_name/section1/page1.php".

I don’t think that telling APACHE that my root directory is [project_name] is the correct approach, because then it wont work for other projects I create. I assume that I should be doing something on a project by project basis to specify it’s own root directory.

I thought that I could specify root by adding an .htaccess file to the project_name folder:

From my online research I thought it would go something like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/$ /PROJECTS/project_name/

or perhaps

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/$ .;C/PHP/AMPSS/www/PROJECTS/project_name/

However I can’t get these to work.

When the site was online, I had also coded <?php set_include_path($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']); //Look for includes starting from ROOT location ?> at the top every page, thinking I was doing the right thing.
Now I am not so sure that I correctly understood what I was doing there. It doesn’t seem to have any impact with or without it in my development environment. And I haven’t been able to edit it in any way successfully to resolve my relative links issue.

Sorry for the long post.

I’m grateful for any and all feedback/assistance. Thanks in advance 🙂

[Resolved] – The advice below was perfect. Thank you all. 🙂

A tip for Chrome users:
If you are using a custom domain, like I did with .dev, either proceed the address with http://, or end it with a trailing /.
For example I now visit my dev site in Chrome by visiting projectname.dev/ (without the last / it tries to search).

At first I thought I had set up VirtualHost or hosts incorrectly, when in reality it was this Chrome behaviour that that was clouding the issue. At the time of writing, other browsers like Firefox don’t share this concern.
Hope that helps someone else out.

Answer 1

You’re correct that configuring Apache for each project is the way forward. It’s best done with virtual hosts. Define a virtual host for each project and give it a domain name or subdomain for development. In my case I use test.com for all my local development and configure project1.test.com, project2.test.com etc so all my relative paths work as expected. For this I also edit my hosts file so the DNS lookup for test.com and sub projects resolve to my local machine.

Rewriting URLs is something I reserve for a project-by-project basis, without setting global rewrites for a specific server setup. That way my local development environment is close to the actual server environment and project-specific rewrites will work as expected.

Hope that helps