Web server on a thumb drive

Posted by David in Servers, XAMPP on 06 21st, 2007 | one response

I recently wrote an article on installing and using XAMPP on a thumb drive, and this got me thinking. (Oh no you say!) This would be a good way of demonstrating a working site to a client. It would work great if you were there with them to start up the server. But what if you wanted to send it to them.

Even if you gave detailed instructions, they wouldn’t figure it out. So after a little digging I found AMPstart. It’s a small package with one small exe file, a config file (.ini) and an auto start file. Don’t use AMPstat it contains spyware!

Your client plugs in the thumb drive and viola, the server starts it’s self, opens their browser to the site on the server. A small icon loads in the systray. When they’re done looking at the site the double click the systray icon and the server shuts down.

Why not just use a cd, you may ask? Well with the thumb drive they will be able to interact with the site, by adding to the MySQL db. Not possible with a cd.

One other benefit to this software is that it does not use XAMPP’s Control Panel, So you will not have to worry about memory leak from pv.exe.

One more thing to note; you can use the .exe file to start your server without the auto start file. So you can replace the Control Panel all together.

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