Has anyone here used AMPPS?

[FrancisChung]

@fbg13 ,  not sure if it's because I had devilbox installed in /opt.
1 of things I'm learning coming from OS/X to Linux is applications can live in all sorts of directories, and some of them require sudo and others don't. Urgh

[fbg13]

Why did you install it in /opt?

I put it on a separate partition so when/if i reinstall i don't have to back up and restore them.

 

[FrancisChung]

@fbg13 : Put that down to me being a Ubuntu noobie. I was googling where the best place to install applications to and there wasn't a definitive answer. Coming from OS/X, this isn't an issue you would normally think about.
So I looked at where my existing applications were installed at. I had only just installed the O/S so I didn't really have many apps. 

1 of the first ones I installed, Chrome, happened to be in /opt. So that's where i chose to install my applications (if I had a say where it goes)

On hindsight, maybe I'll do things differently in the next build.

So you recommend a separate, entire partition for applications only? I'm guessing this wouldn't work if I switched distros for example right? Does it still work if you go from different versions of the same distro?
 

[fbg13]

On linux distros you use package managers to install software (packages).

If there is no package you need to build and install the software from source, which can be a pain in the ass, especially if it has many dependencies (you have to build and install those too).

9 hours ago, FrancisChung said:

So you recommend a separate, entire partition for applications only?

No, just devilbox (not the entire partition just for devilbox though). You can do that for other apps to but it gets complicated.

9 hours ago, FrancisChung said:

I'm guessing this wouldn't work if I switched distros for example right? Does it still work if you go from different versions of the same distro?

For devilbox it will work, as long as you have docker and docker-compose installed. For other apps it depends, some will work some will not.

[FrancisChung]

1 hour ago, fbg13 said:

On linux distros you use package managers to install software (packages).

Yeah that's my normal method too, but I don't recall devilbox having that option.
 

1 hour ago, fbg13 said:

If there is no package you need to build and install the software from source

I'm pretty sure this is what turned me off Unix many moons ago. Especially the packages you mentioned that had dependencies upon dependencies. 

[MilenKo]

Hello all. I just got into this topic while searching if someone else had issues using AMPPS with PW, where I can import the DB, pull up the admin but it is not logging. Funny enough, the reason for me using AMPPS is because I am playing with a MAC to see how good is the performance over Linux. So far it is all good and I know AMPPS is for LINUX, WINDOWS, MAC but with Linux I had an issue with the parked domains where the records of the domain were not added automatically to the hosts file. 

In other words it works fine for web dev on the three major OS'es and I will give a try to devilbox, but bear in mind that you might loose the ability to login to admin (at least under macOS High Sierra). I am testing now with a fresh install of ProcessWire as the first attempt was to import an existing project I am working on under Win with another server and see its portability.

[FrancisChung]

@MilenKo, If you're on OS/x I'd recommend using MAMP or MAMP Pro. I would just NOT recommend AMPPS at this stage, for any platform going on my personal experience.

I'm not familiar with High Sierra, but not being able to run DevilBox with elevated privileges could be an issue. That certainly was the case in Ubuntu.

[MilenKo]

Hello Francis. 

To be honest, I was trying to find an easy to work with platform that would be OS independent - that is why I tried to use AMPPS. The issue I mentioned earlier was nicely pointed out during the Processwire Installer - mod_rewrite was not enabled by default, so after enabling it and restarting AMPPS - it is all working just fine. So if anyone is trying to use AMPPS for MAC OS - at least under High Sierra 13.6 it is working perfectly fine. One of the things I liked about AMPPS was that through the web admin I could just type my desired domain and it would add automatically all the info to the hosts file as well as all configurations of Apache, PHP etc. 

For sure I could use a simple MySQL, Apache and PHP installers and configure them manually, however it is just nice and easy to "install" ampps to Applications folder and even backup the hosts/domains easily.

It is true, that I had issues with the virtual hosts being added under Linux in the past and I remember contacting the support for that, but I should test it now to confirm if that issue still exists. For now I am sticking with macOS HS and AMPPS. Thanks for the feedback. 

P.S. As far as I've been working with Ubuntu for quite some years, I will fire up my Linux box and try to install the Devilbox to see where the issue might be and how to recover it. I've just never heard/used that stack so it would be nice to try it and make it run (eventually). 

[FrancisChung]

6 hours ago, MilenKo said:

trying to find an easy to work with platform that would be OS independent - that is why I tried to use AMPPS

I was trying to do the same, but the installer for Ubuntu doesn't work!
I'm glad it worked out for you though.

If you do end up using Devilbox, don't forget to use sudo. I think that's where I got thrown off initially.
 

[MilenKo]

@FrancisChung Maybe I did not express myself correctly but under Ubuntu, I was able to install AMPPS but it shows empty screen on the AMPPS Admin. I passed through the empty screen by adding some strings to /etc folder and have the ability to start/stop services and see the apache fired up promptly. The only issue left is that it still does not add the parked domains to /etc/hosts and I have to manually add it so I am in touch with the support to have this fixed somehow. If I achieve a fully working state, I will provide a little installation howto for anyone that is looking forward trying it. It is very good for local development (even though I am not comparing the performance as I am working on a computer with tons of ram and cpu power) and what is most important - works under Windows, Mac and Linux (for now hosts file needs to be edited manually even if the app is started as SU) It is not a big deal, but is a glitch that I would like to learn how to have fixed and do everything from the admin panel ?

[MilenKo]

OK, it seems like Ampps is working fine for linux (atleast I've tested it with Ubuntu 18.04LTS and Linux MInt 19 which are my preffered choice for now), however there is a glitch in the app that does not edit the hosts file (/etc/hosts) so everytime you add a parked domain, you should just add the record for it in the hosts file, like:

 

127.0.0.1   blablabla.com (where blablabla.com has been added in Ampps). I know it is not the perfect world, however starting to work on a project does not take a minute or so so it is OK if one has to add the domain for now and use it for a week, month etc. I got in touch with the technical support and proved that it is not an issue of permissions by changing the permissions to /etc/hosts to 777 as well as running the app as super user, so they should look into this issue and have it fixed, however as of now (5 days later as of my last reply) there was nothing pinpointing the issue and an eventual fix, so just decided to share the experience so far with the rest of you. Hope it helps someone in his choice of preferred stack as I really liked Ampps for Windows and Mac, but not so much on Linux yet...

 

 

 

[pwired]

Hi, MilenKo

Did you ever do a performance test between Ampps and Mamp on Mac ? Or between Ampps and Wamp on Windows ? Or between Ampps and another stack ?

I noticed a difference between Ampps and Laragon on Windows. Laragon is really faster.