Flipflops.org

Like a lot of people I do most of my development work on windows PC and locally run a web a server and database. Like a a lot of people I just downloaded and installed a server bundle. For the last few years I have used Apache2triad and it has generally been pretty painless, but I’ve recently been forced to abandon it. Unfortunately the development seems to have been abandoned about 2 years ago.

The reason I abandoned Apache2triad was PHP versions - I wanted to do some work with Google Base using the Zend Google Data Library which required PHP 5.1.4+.

Looking around at the various bundles I decided to go with XAMPP - a lot of people seem to use it and it seems to get pretty good feedback. I won’t say the process was entirely painless (it took a couple of goes to get everything up and running) but eventually it all seemed OK.

The fun started when I decided to do a bit of baking (generating scaffolding code for my CakePHP app from a command line interface). Nothing worked.

Looking into it I discovered more than I wanted to know about the PHP Command Line Interface (CLI) which I had happily used for years with no idea it actually existed, having assumed it was just there as part of PHP.

After a lot googleing and a lot of trial and error I got it all working again and this is how I did it.

My environment is Windows XP Pro Service Pack 2 with XAMPP installed on E:/

1. Downloaded the latest version of PHP and replaced the entire contents of E:\xampp\php\.
2. Added to the E:\xampp\php to my environment PATH.

At this stage PHP CLI wwas now working but there were nasty errors e.g. I was uanble to connect to MySQL from scripts. I discovered that this is because PHP CLI uses a different php.ini file to regular PHP.

To fix this I copied my php.ini from E:\xampp\apache\bin\php.ini (the default XAMPP ini file) to E:\xampp\php.

I then checked the PHP CLI again using php -v at a command prompt. There were now about 6 errors displayed, concerned with modules that could not be loaded or found. I believe that these concern modules just that aren’t meaningful in CLI mode. So I went through my new php.ini in E:\xampp\php and commented out the directives that were causing the errors until PHP CLI ran without errors.

I feel a bit daft posting this because in the end the answer was so easy to find - but maybe it will help somebody else.

I’ve been re-writing my users / groups permission system for CakePHP 1.2 and decided to incorporate as much built in functionality as possible so I’m using the Auth Component - which is great - but one thing kept bugging me, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get the messages from Auth to display in my views - but by debugging I could see they were sitting there right in the Session.

I spent a long time Googling and looking at the API for clues, eventually in desperation I looked at the cookbook (I have no idea why I hadn’t already looked there - as I use it a lot…) and the answer was both very easy and staring me right in the face.

Just pop the following in a view or layout:

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if ($session->check('Message.auth')) {
		$session->flash('auth');
	}