ridaalbarazi.welcome

Last time in Part 1 of this article we prepared our Apache web server and MailEnable mail server and assured that they are available online with a hostname of our choice that is dynamically updated with our IP via No-IP DUC.

Now in Part two we will install MySQL as the Database server, and PHP with its integration with Apache using Apache Modules and finally we’ll install TurboDBAdmin script as the online database administration script.

MySQL Database

MySQL is a free SQL database management system, one of the most famous databases available now for open source development specially with PHP, many books have been written on both, it is also known as a key of both LAMP and WAMP the two most used open source development environments. Now let’s start the installation:

• Run the installation wizard downloaded in Part 1, and choose “Custom setup” in order to change the directory to your development path D:\development:

• “Skip Sign-UP” in the “MySQL.com Sign-Up” screen, unless you prefer to do so.
• After the installation wizard is done check the “Configure the MySQL Server Now” box in order to start the configuration wizard.
• In “MySQL Server Instance Configuration” choose “Standard Configuration”, then confirm that the “Install As Windows Service”, “Launch the MySQL Server automatically” and “Include Bin Directory in Windows PATH” options are checked.
• Now in the “Security Options”, as we have our server available online, we don’t want to allow any access to our MySQL server from outside, so we will set a password for our “root” user account and disable both anonymous account and remote access from remote machines options.

By setting the security options and finalizing the configuration wizard we have MySQL up and running on our local server, MySQL essential package doesn’t come with any graphical interface for the database system, so after we install PHP and integrate it with Apache we will install TurboDBAdmin as our graphical interface which will be available online as well.

PHP

I prefer the manual installation of PHP as it includes more extensions and it is more customizable, and luckily it is not difficult to do, just unzip the downloaded PHP compressed file (from Part 1) into your development directory D:\Development, and that’s it, PHP is there now, we only need to add it to the Windows PATH environment variables, and apply the PHP5Apache2 module.

To setup the Windows PATH variables go to Windows Control Panel -> System, and from the Advanced tab click on the “Environment Variables” button, in the System Variable section, edit the PATH variable and add your PHP path D:\development\php where php.exe exists, now wherever PHP is called it will be found.

Configuring Apache

In order to allow Apache to parse any PHP code placed in our web directory we have to load the PHP5 Apache2 Module, the module is available as a DLL file in our php directory under the name php5apache2.dll, we have to load it in Apache, add php file type and specify the PHP Ini Directory by adding the following lines to our httpd.conf file (located in D:\development\Apache2\conf\):

#
# Dynamic Shared Object (DSO) Support
#
# To be able to use the functionality of a module which was built as a DSO you
# have to place corresponding `LoadModule' lines at this location so the
# directives contained in it are actually available _before_ they are used.
# Statically compiled modules (those listed by `httpd -l') do not need
# to be loaded here.
#
# Example:
# LoadModule foo_module modules/mod_foo.so
#
 
LoadModule php5_module "d:/development/php/php5apache2.dll"
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
PHPIniDir "d:/development/php"

To keep your httpd.conf clean and organized insert the above lines in the DSO Support section right after the default modules loads, and don’t forget to restart Apache after saving the changes.

To test PHP let’s create a small PHP file that call the php information function in our webroot folder D:\webroot\info.php and let’s try it http://yoursubdomain.no-ip.org:8520/info.php

<?php
  phpinfo();
?>

The phpinfo() function shows all the information about PHP on the local server in a nice html markup. Now PHP is working perfectly, you can run any PHP script not only locally but online also as you have an online web server.

TurboDBAdmin

With our secure database and the ability to run PHP scripts, we will install TurboDBAdmin which is a PHP script with some lovely Ajax touches that gives a nice interface to our database, and we will secure it using .htaccess.

To run the script just unzip the downloaded TurboDBAdmin compressed file (from Part 1) to the webroot folder as D:\webroot\turbodbadmin\, and edit the configuration file D:\webroot\turbodbadmin\php\config.php to meet your database credentials, by changing the “root” password around line 10 to the one you have created earlier during MySQL configuration wizard.

Let’s try it now: http://yoursubdomain.no-ip.org:8520/trubodbadmin, it’s working and we are able to see our database system, create tables, import, export, etc… Great but this script is available online now and anybody who knows the url can mess up our database system so let’s secure this directory using http security.

Securing TurboDBAdmin

To secure our script we will use http security by creating .htaccess and htpasswd users file into the script directory, first lets create the user file:

• From the command prompt change directory to D:\development\Apache\bin\

  cd D:\\development\\Apache\\bin\\

• Use the htpasswd tool provided by Apache to create your users file with the user of your choice:

  htpasswd -c D:\\webroot\\turbodbadmin\\users admin

  It will prompt you for the password to create, and creates the file for you, if you want to add other users to your users file just use the same command without “-c” option:

  htpasswd D:\\webroot\\turbodbadmin\\users username

• Using a text editor of your choice create a new file as D:\webroot\turbodbadmin\.htaccess (notice the dot before the name):

  AuthType Basic
  AuthName "Restricted Area"
  AuthUserFile D:/webroot/turbodbadmin/users
  Require valid-user

• Finally we have to change Apache configuration to allow AuthConfig, in httpd.conf in DocumentRoot Directory directive, you will find:

  # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
  # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
  #   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
  #
      AllowOverride None
  

  Which we have to change into:

  AllowOverride AuthConfig

  Restart Apache now and check http://yoursubdomain.no-ip.org:8520/turbodbadmin/ and finally we have our script folder secured.

You can generate your own .htaccess and htpasswd files using .htaccess Tools website, it has some other nice features too.

Summary

After two parts of this article we have a complete WAMP environment, Apache 2, MySQL 5 and PHP 5 installed and working perfectly on our Win32 box, we also installed TurboDBAdmin script as our online graphical interface to administer MySQL, and secured it using Apache security.

In the next part I’ll be talking about Ruby and Rails and how to configure them on Windows as it needs a complete individual post to talk about it.