[bazzup]

hi jeff,

I'll quote these instructions from another site.

There is Nothing like working on your site and trying out the latest tricks or making a layout change and having the whole thing just come crashing down around you. The dreaded "page not found" or pages being rendered wrongly can be costly. Not only in time but in visitors that have tried to view your site, only to see its gone now! We have all been there at some point in time and know its pain. 1st impresions are important and chances are once they attempt to visit your website, and its down- or looks all wierd, they wont be back. Lets try to avoid that by setting up a test server.

Usually setting up servers is a little more complex on the windows OS and cross platform problems begin to appear. This is because most web servers use Apache running on Linux or Unix. XP/ME/98 all use a diff format then the *nix Operating Systems (OS). Therefore most of the time it was best to have a dedicated pc or seperate partition running linux and apache. Making the simple desire to have a test server, a complex problem with a steep learning curve. Well that time has passed.

With Uniform server, its so simple that if you can setup a forum or run a CMS like joomla you CAN run a test server using Uniform. Its so easy and believe this, there is nothing to install. You can even fit it on a flash drive, or a cd and run it from there.

Step 1->
The first thing to do is download the latest version from here. You want the most recent version (right now it is 3.3) so download either the .exe or the .zip if you prefer zip files. The .exe will just extract the files for you on its own. The download is only 5.8mb so its really small for a fully functional server.

Step 2->
Once downloaded go to the location you saved the file and double click to start the extraction. It will ask where you want it to extract the files to. Choose your desktop or somewhere else that you can find it easily (if you downloaded the .zip file then use winzip, winrar or similar to extract the files).

Step 3->
Once extracted the files will be in a folder named "Uniform Sever". Thats it! There is no installation at all. It runs right from that folder so you can put it anywhere on your hdd. It will emulate a new hard drive W: as your website drive when its running. You can move this "Uniform Server" folder to a cdrw, flash drive any portable media even and take your test site with you! Great for site backups too.

Now that you have the folder (actually the server) lets set somthing up once to see how it works.

Open the Uniform Server folder now. Inside you will find 1 folder and 3 files.
"Server_Start.bat" will start apache and everything needed for the server just by clicking it.
"Stop.bat" will shut the server down and all programs its using (mySQL, php, apache etc,).
"Disk Start.vbs" you wont do anything with so ignore that file.
"diskw" is the folder for the emulated hard drive w that the uniform server uses. This is where all your website files are saved.

So its really as simple as clicking Server_start to start it up and Stop.bat to shut it all down.

O.K. now your wondering "where do all my site files go then? On vistapages I put them under my www folder so where do they go here?"

Open the folder named diskw. Now THIS should look familiar. If you use a FTP program or the cpanel file manager youve seen these folders before. Open the folder named www. Youll see a few files here. The only one you need is the .htaccess file! The other three are the files used for the default site http://localhost/. You can delete "favicon.icon" "index.php" and the "images" folder if you want to. Now its just like the www folder on vistapages. Anything named index on the homepage will be the site loaded when going to http://localhost/

So if you have a folder say named "album" on your vistapages site, you would have one in your test server aswell under www folder. To then open that folder in a browser its also exactly the same http://yoursitename.com/albums/ becomes http://localhost/albums
Its the same file structure in everything you do so no confusing changes aside from the domain name becoming localhost on your test site.


Now that the file structure is explained lets move onto getting it up and running. So lets get it started. Double click Server_start.bat Youll see a black box popup then diapear in a flash, this is the .bat launching all the "stuff" the server needs. Now your browser will automatically open to the address http://localhost/apanel/

"what is apanel?"
Think of apanel as Uniform Servers version of Cpanel we are used to here at vistapages. apanel is where you control your server and the services it runs. By default everything you need for basic websites is started.

If you have a CMS, Forum or any data base (DB) driven software then there is one more thing to start. If you closed the browser earlier when it opened just go there now. Open your browser (Internet explorer for instance) and put http://localhost/apanel/ in the address bar. Click go. Now your in the apenl. On the left of apanel youll see a column you can scroll down. Up at the top left where it says Server Start click the 3rd link under it Run MySQL
This will start MySQL for those DB driven sites. If you look further down that left column under tools youll see the all familiar phpMyAdmin. Here you can easily insert/update/copy tables, run querys, you name it. Its a full featured phpMyAdmin.

On your live site, open phpMyAdmin, choose the DB you want to use. once that opens select the export tab. Now choose .sql and save as file. Save this to your desktop.

Open Uniform servers phpMyadmin. Create a Data Base (DB) with same name as your live sites DB. Now you have a test DB but no data in it. In phpMyAdmin on the left side under databases: select the db name you just created. It will open that db, now at top you see tabs, these let you do diff things with the currently selected data base. Click the SQL tab. In here you want to either enter SQL as text or in our case just under that area that looks like a text box you see "OR location of teh text file. Click the "browse" button there and point to the file you downloaded earlier from your live site. Now simply click "go" under it. You now have a clone of you database thats online. Neat huh.

Next Uniform server guides will tell you how to setup a domain name on the uniform server, use redirects, how to access your test server from other networked pcs on your lan by editing .htaccess, and adding security by chaning the default username and passes. I hope this guide helps some in over coming the intimidation of setting up their very own test server.

its a bit outdated this as the post i quoted it from is a cople of years old but its very easy to setup and use

regards

bazz