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About the Author
Joseph Ucuzoglu
Joe is a manager of marketing and academic technology at FSMFN, a graduate-level distance-learning nursing university. In the past he has worked on web sites for Disney’s Internet Group and for NBC Universal.
Portable Apps: A Mobile Office For A Desktop Computer
While portable applications have been available for quite some time, it was only recently that I realized how incredibly useful having a complete portable web development environment could be. The best part is that such an environment can be created quickly, easily and for free. All you need is a portable drive (I use a 4GB USB Flash drive, which you can pick up for under $30 these days) and a computer.
For the purposes of this tutorial, I've chosen to use the Windows operating system and only open source applications.
Do you have 15 minutes to spare? If so, grab your portable drive! You're only four steps away from a completely portable web development environment. Let's get started!
Getting Portable
Start by downloading and installing the Portable Apps Suite (Base Edition). This program gives you a friendly front end, and will make installing other portable applications on our flash drive a snap.
Stacking Your Stick
Our next step will be to install the core of our web development environment. My personal choice is XAMPP, which provides all of the essentials. In particular, we're interested in:
- Apache (Web Server)
- MySql (Database)
- PHP (Web Scripting)
- PHPMyAdmin (Database Interface)
To install the XAMPP Stack:
- Download XAMPP Lite.
- Extract the contents of this archive to the root directory of your portable drive.
- Download XAMPP Launcher 1.2.
- Launch the PortableApps Suite, and click Options.
- Select the downloaded file. The installer will take care of the rest.
To test the stack, follow these steps:
- Open the XAMPP Control Panel, shown in Figure 2 above.
- Click the Start button for both Apache and MySQL.
- Launch your web browser of choice, and enter
http://localhost/in the address bar. You should see the XAMPP for Windows start page pictured in Figure 3.
Now click the Status link, which is located in the left sidebar. You should see a list of green "activated" notifications next to PHP and MySQL.
Congratulations -- your portable PHP-enabled web server and database are up and running!
Note: Not Intended For Production!
If you're planning on using this configuration to power a public-facing web site, you may want to think again. Read the section titled A Matter of Security on the Apache Friends site to find out more about what's involved in securing your portable web environment.
