Linux : Eclipse PDT and running as PHP Web application

Question

I installed Eclipse PDT for PHP development on my Ubuntu box (running Apache2 as server),

I tried to create a PHP project and run it as "PHP Web Application" as show in the picture:

But when I click "Run" the browser pops out and giving 404 error saying it cant find localhost/test/newfile.php .

Does Eclipe PDT having its own internal webserver? (If so, I tried by shutting down my Apache2 ,but still giving the same error)

Finally, as a work around, I changed my workspace location to "/var/www" and created my projects there. But wondering whether its the best way to develop using PDT?

Answer 1

The questions you ask are not directly related to Eclipse PDT but how to setup the development server.

I suggest not to move the project into the webroot but to make Apache visit your development/project directory instead.

There are multiple ways to do that:

• You can create a symlink (softlink) making a URL-Path point to a directory. You need to allow Apache to follow symlinks.
• You can make use of the Alias directive to do something similar.
• Virtual Hosts to make the webserver point to the location you're looking for via it's domain name. You can then create "fake" domain names within your hosts file like example.com.loc for the local development version of your website.
• You can even use mod_rewrite for that (not that good option).

As you can see there are multiple ways to have this in a manageable fashion. Depending on your needs, the symlink variant is probably most easy to accomplish. If you need more security, the Alias Directive is similarly easy to accomplish. Virtual hosts start to make sense if you're more familiar with apache configuration and you need more control of the URLs (some software is that dumb that it needs to reside on the top path / beneath an URL otherwise it just does not work (yeah, crap, but virtual hosts come to the rescue then). The mod_rewrite "solution" is just named for completeness reasons, it's more asking for trouble if you're not firm with mod_rewrite and as you're new to apache configuration, leave it next to your road and ignore that suggestion.

All these ways allow you to have one or more development projects next to static websites on your server. I personally have configured virtual hosts on my devbox, and on my earlier devbox I was just using alias directives.

Keep in mind that you need to restart the apache service if you edited the configuration:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And most importantly: Before you edit the configuration file, copy it over to a backup file-name. Always backup configuration files before you edit them. You don't want to loose the working settings, believe me ;)