Is different installation directory possible?

[sootsnoot]

On Windows, the installation is very accommodating of different locations for the xampp tree. And so I have several different versions of xampp on my PC, and can run any of them easily using the xampp-control.exe from the tree I want to run.

Linux doesn't appear to have any such flexibility in the installation, and I've read somewhere that '/opt/lampp' is hardwired into some of the binaries. Hopefully, I can run the .run file and let it install in /opt/lampp, then rename /opt/lamp/ to /opt/xampp-version-string, and make /opt/lampp a symlink to /opt/xampp/version-string. Is this likely to cause any problems? The one problem I can foresee is just that I will need to be careful to stop xampp and remove the /opt/lampp symlink before running the installer, and then restore the symlink to point to the version I want to run before starting the servers again. I know that it's not recommended for production out-of-the-box, but we've had servers with some security added to the configurations running 24x7 since 2012, and several hundred users that depend on them. We need to upgrade our version of PHP from 5.4 to 5.6, and having both version available on the server and quick to switch in case of trouble is pretty important to us.

Thanks for any tips!

[Nobbie]

Of course you can create a symlink and run Xampp from there.

What i dont understand - why dont you simply give it a try? You would have been ready after 1 minute, even way faster than writing this big question. Its so easy, simply do it, if it does not work (but it works) delete it and THEN you could ask anyway. Actually, thats a plain linux issue, not a Xampp issue.

We need to upgrade our version of PHP from 5.4 to 5.6, and having both version available on the server and quick to switch in case of trouble is pretty important to us.

Wow - both of them pretty outdated. No support. Nothing. You really *should* think about switching from superold Xampp to a new distribution (included in the repository of your distribution). Xampp is meant for educational use at home only.

[sootsnoot]

Thanks for the reply.
But believe me, after 50 years as a software engineer, I'm quite familiar with the "try it and see" approach to software upgrades. Unless you have a very thorough, extensive test system, you can't be sure that what appears to work really works. And we don't have any sort of automated test system. We had barely started on one based on phpunit and selenium, but "upgrades" to them left us without a working one at all. Since a program can tell whether or not a pathname specifies a symbolic link, and things like permissions work differently with symbolic links, there's no way of knowing whether a symlink for the tree would break any of the code in xampp based on just "try it and see". That's why I wrote the question. It would be safer to mount different xampp trees on /opt/lampp, but hoped that a symlink would work. Make more sense now?

[Nobbie]

Then there is probably no other option for you than months of testing, if you need to know so exactly. Because here are also only users of Xampp, no developers of Apache, PHP or MariaDB.

And also Bitnami does not develop the software, Bitnami only delivers a compilation (a distribution) of the tools, preconfigured.

Here everyone also only has the possibility to simply try it out, but that's not enough for you. So get to work and run all your test - and free support for companies is not provided by this forum anyway.

[sootsnoot]

Cool your jets, Nobbie. Yes, this is a company, consisting of two people, and I'm the developer and IT department. The website has been running since 2012, and has netted 0 revenue: it is a free service, a labor of love. We are just now looking into how to generate some revenue by charging for a new premium service for our users, while keeping the existing basic services free. We started the company in 2010, after I got laid off, and got the site up and running in 2012, funded personally by the CEO (I'm on Social Security and don't get paid for the site). Okay?

And, BTW, I truly do appreciate the work that goes into making xampp available, and making it such a great product. Being able to get identical pre-integrated versions of php, Apache, and mySQL up and running on both my PC and on Amazon Linux was the only thing that made our site possible. We're still running 1.8.2. In order to use stripe for payment processing with the new premium feature, we're moving to 5.6.40. As I get older, dealing with software upgrades gets harder and harder. Some years ago, I had worked my butt off integrating WordPress multi-site into our site, so that each of our users could be the admin of their own blogsite. I had used the WP Edit Pro plugin, which to me was vastly superior to any other post editor. A couple of years later, WordPress decides to go with the Gutenberg block editor. Totally destroying the fantastic work Josh Lobe had done on that plugin, not to mention our site's ability to stay current with WordPress. Luckily for me, my CEO did not like the idea of blogsites for our users, and she scuttled the idea of shipping that implementation as soon as I had it fully working on our development server...

[Nobbie]

Absolutely ok. I'm really incredibly impressed. I honestly don't care at all. In case you forgot: You're asking for help, not me. In return, I get to decide who I help. The tone makes the music.

All the best.

[sootsnoot]

Cool, just trying to explain why I'm using such old versions. Windows 11 you say? No thanks, I say

[Nobbie]

I dont use Windows for many years and did not mention Windows. Do you have a reading disability?

[sootsnoot]

Sorry, rhetorical questions sometimes don't work well in writing