WampServer 2.0 is a nice tool to help you develop a new site on your local computer. However, you’ll probably need more packages/libraries than those included with WampServer. This post is about installing extra common features which are mostly present at hosting servers, but not (directly) on WampServer.
PHPUnit
One of the features which I need when starting a new project is a Unittest framework. The two most common are SimpleTest and PHPUnit. SimpleTest can be downloaded and used right away. The PHPUnit manual advises to use PEAR to install PHPUnit. Joshua Doodnauth explains how to activate PEAR and how to install PHPUnit on WampServer. However, as I was running WampServer 2.0i with PHP 5.3, the file go-pear.phar in the PEAR subdirectory was not working correctly. The solution to this is presented here. By executing the command
php -d phar.require_hash=0 go-pear.phar
the problem is solved and PEAR is installed.
After that however, when I tried to get back to Joshua’s how-to, the PEAR version was not correct. This site helped me to update PEAR. When PEAR is installed, type
pear channel-update pear.php.net
in the terminal. This will update the PEAR channel. After that, by typing in
pear upgrade PEAR
the PEAR installation will be updated. From that point on PHPUnit can be installed as described at Joshua’s blog.
Crontab
A feature which I use pretty often is the crontab. It can schedule and execute scripts at particular moments. A crontab is not provided by WampServer. However, there are external solutions available. One such solutions is nnCron of nnSoft. This is a crontab which can be installed by executing the installer file. The LITE (free) version already provides the desired functionality. The way it works is pretty simple: in the install directory there are batch files startcron.bat and stopcron.bat which allow to start the crontab and stop it. The file cron.tab contains the crontab lines.
N.B. Using WampServer and this Crontab, you can write automated tasks in PHP for executing tasks on your local machine. (Nice!).
Mootools
Today I was unpleasantly surprised that Mootools doesn’t work on WampServer. I tried various demo’s of AJAX calls, but none of them worked. When I tried one on an online web server it worked directly. So far I haven’t been able to find topics about this problem, so any help is appreciated!’
Thans buddy, you saved my time.