Ask Felgall

A few weeks ago I attempted to install XAMPP and when I couldn’t get that to work I tried WAMP5 which didn’t work either.

In both cases the install ran with few problems and it was only when I went to create the databases I needed using phpmyadmin that I struck problems. More recently I did separate installs of Apache, PHP, mySQL, and phpmyadmin. This also had the same problem with phpmyadmin when I got to that stage.

The big difference between my attempts with the two integrated products and the later separate installs is that in the latter case I was able to run tests in between installing each compoment in order to more closely identify why there was a problem. In fact the testing that I did showed that there was no problem whatever with the Apache, PHP, and mySQL installs and that only phpmyadmin had a problem.

In each of the three different attempts I actually reached the same point before striking a problem. The difference (and what enabled me to track down and fix the problem) was that in installing each component separately I had narrowed down where the error could be. With the XAMPP and WAMP5 installs I had no idea whether the reason that phpmyadmin wasn’t working was because of a problem with Apache, PHP, mySQL, or something else. The separate installs proved that it was something else.

At the time I wrote about XAMPP and WAMP5 a few weeks ago I was rather annoyed at being unable to get either install to work. Now that I know that the flaw is actually in phpmyadmin, I can now say that either XAMPP or WAMP5 would be an easier way to install these products all in one go provided that you have your security set such that phpmyadmin will run. After allowing for the problem that I had which stopped any install of those products from working until I fixed it, I can now say that if I had not had the problem with phpmyadmin then the WAMP5 install would have run perfectly with no additional customisation of the configuration files being required. XAMPP makes for a nicer final install than WAMP5 bit did need some minor changes to the php.ini file as it made assumptions about everything being installed to the C: drive (which was not where I was installing it).

I am not going to reinstall XAMPP now that I know why I couldn’t get it to work before but only because I have already installed all of the components of it that I need (some of which are more recent versions than in XAMPP).

After spending several hours attempting to track down and fix all the errors in the various config files that XAMPP managed to totally stuff up (by inserting \ insead of / and leaving off drive letters), I still kept getting errors all over the place when trying to access web pages I copied there. As for phpMyAdmin, it absolutely refused to allow me to import any databases or run any SQL commands at all.

The next step was to uninstall the Apache and mySQL services from XAMPP and try an install of WAMP5 instead.

WAMP5 installed much easier than XAMPP did since it did not stuff up the config files. That saved me the time I had spent manually rebuilding the config files in XAMPP and got me to the same point with WAMP5 in tem minutes that it had taken over five hours to get to with XAMPP. Unfortunately the install was still corrupted in exactly the same way as the “repaired” XAMPP install was and still refused to allow me to run any SQL.

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