Initial XAMPP 8.2 setup issues

[marctremblay]

Hi, I'm a first time user of XAMPP. I'm trying to set it up on macOS and although I'm trying to follow the how-to guide that comes with it, there are a couple things that don't work. I've spent almost 1 hour trying to set those 2 things and they just don't work:

1) When I reboot the computer, XAMPP services (such as Apache) don't automatically start. The file org.apachefriends.xampp.plist is in /Library/LaunchDaemons. If I launch Terminal and execute the following command "/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/xampp start" then it says "Starting XAMPP for Mac OS X 8.2.4-0... You need to be root to perform this action."

2) I cannot for the life of me change XAMPP doc root. I tried to edit the DocumentRoot line in these files, restart Apache, reboot the computer... but it still serves me the initial folder that comes with it "/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs" no matter what I try.
a) /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/etc/httpd.conf
b) /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/etc/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

[marctremblay]

Alright, so I managed to get a little further with issue #2 by following these steps: https://community.apachefriends.org/f/viewtopic.php?t=82746&p=278576

But now, I only get blank PHP pages no matter which script I request and in the access log, I see that every single request results in error 500. Then in the error log, I see that for every request, it results in this: PHP Warning: Unknown: Failed to open stream: Operation not permitted in Unknown on line 0

Does anybody have a step by step tutorial on how to install XAMPP from scratch and make it work with a different htdocs location? I need it to parse PHP files from my www folder on my USB drive.

[marctremblay]

I spent another day on this and I can get it to work correctly for a minute but the next minute (and for no apparent reason) every single request then returns an error 500 with Unknown: Failed to open stream: Operation not permitted in Unknown on line 0

There is no apparent reason or explanation to this. No change is made to any of the conf files and 100% of the requests return the error after a minute or so, even a simple echo PHP script with nothing else in it, but the minute before, that exact same PHP script was working. It almost looks like XAMPP is corrupting itself upon restart or something. I have reinstalled it more than 20 times during the day and for the first minute, everything works fine, and then everything stops working and outputs error 500.

Any idea? I have never seen this my entire life. Been a WAMP user for more than 15 years and I've never had such trouble setting up a PHP/MYSQL stack.

[marctremblay]

Finally ended up trying the free version of MAMP yesterday with a home brew'ed PHP 8.2.17 and in under 5 minutes I was all set up and it's been running since then without any issue, even after rebooting.