Anorgan’s blog about stuff

Test environment viewer

I have a couple of test projects in my test directory. This is where I usually put the latest wordpress, phpBB or any other script or web software I would like to test out or develop and play with. Until recently I had to access those by writing the virtual host path (www.test.local) and then append the directory name (in.eg. /drupal). I got tired of it, and coded a nifty little “browser” which displays all of the directories and files. Combined with the DNS wildcards, you can have unlimited virtual domains without having to configure them in vhosts, setting the /etc/hosts and restarting apache server. I have included this in the zip file found at the end of this post.

We are using bind dns server to resolve everything that comes to the “test” domain to your machines IP address. After that, Apache takes care of the rest. And what he does is kinda cool. The .htaccess file has a set of rules to test weather the index.php exists in the requested directory (via subdomain), and if it does, he redirects us to that directory. If the index.php doesn’t exist, our “main” index.php shows the contents of that directory, so you can select any other file and run it. Let’s start.

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I’m developing web sites for quite some time now, started when i was… Young? Yellow? Well, started a long time a go in a galaxy… AARGH! Can’t get Star Wars out of my life! Anyway. In the beginning i was using the good old php mess approach:

echo '<ul>';
foreach($array as $item) {
echo '<li>Some $item here</li>';
}
echo '<ul>';


And so on. For onepagers this was enough. So i stumbled accross mambo (former Joomla) and saw the raw power of cms and, well for me, good coding. K, let’s make ourselves a content management system. But how? What do we need? The neccesary ingridients where these:

• Apache with php (obvious)
• MySQL database (oh, what’s this database thing for?)
• foresight

What’s the most important? No, wrong, not coffee. Foresight! Without analyzing and planning the outcome can’t be good. I started to code. Heavily. Took a good number of different approaches, all ended bit dull and like they couldn’t take on serious tasks.

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