Tips and tricks for LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) developers.

When I cant find a suitable solution to a problem and have to work it out for myself I'll post the result here so hopefully others will find it useful. (All code is offered in good faith. It may not be the best solution, just a solution).

Sunday 26 September 2010

Symlinks in Windows

Not strictly a LAMP tip this as it's for Windows but I found it useful recently.

I'm using the rather awesome XAMPP to do some development for one of my personal sites on my Windows machine and I wanted to symlink my codebase into XAMPP's equivalent of a 'public_html' folder (they call it 'htdocs'). I tried simply creating a shortcut but this doesn't work as a shortcut isn't a direct pointer but is a file in itself so Apache just tries to read that file.

After much Googling I discovered that, since Vista, Microsoft have introduced a symlinking function, MKLINK:


MKLINK /D C:\path\to\link C:\path\to\target

The /D specifies a link to a directory as the default is to a file.

This worked a treat on my Windows 7 machine! Who knew Vista introduced something useful?! ;)