XAMPP Upgrade Tasks

I usually have 3 simple and separate tasks for a XAMPP upgrade or any general development environment migration (for example when moving to a new Windows or Mac hardware).

1. Moving the source codes, files and assets: copy the www folder with all the project source codes local virtual host domains
2. Apache configuration: edit the httpd.conf and httpd-vhosts.conf files
3. MySQL migration: migrate the database

Source files

Usually I have a separate www folder configured with vhosts.

Apache Configuration

I only change the following line in httpd.conf because I like to develop on port 8080.

Listen 8080

And as a habit (Debian and FreeBSD) check if the vhosts file is included:

Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

The httpd-vhosts.conf file has multiple entries (for each project or local domain name):

<VirtualHost *:8080>
    ServerName client1.san
    ServerAlias www.client1.san
    DocumentRoot C:/xampp/www/client1
</VirtualHost>

MySQL Migration

A fresh copy of a pristine MySQL installation with PHPMyAdmin has the following databases:

• information_schema
• mysql
• performance_schema
• phpmyadmin
• test

So when migrating I try to avoid copying over those five databases / schema.

Preview(opens in a new tab)

While it might be OK to dump the database via PHPMyAdmin, it’s not a good idea to restore it via a web interface. For example my combined database size is almost 1 GB.

So ensure you have a decent max_allowed_packet size in specified in my.ini:

max_allowed_packet=16M

Then run the database restore command manually from the command line. For example:

mysql -u root < databases_to_migrate.sql