Managing Xampp on USB for Mac and Windows machines

Question

I am working on some PHP projects (Wordpress mostly) with MySQL databases and primarily use my Windows Desktop to do the work on whilst running Xampp.

This all works great until I need to take my work on my mac via my usb hardrive. I copy my files from my windows machine on to my USB external and then I go to my macbook and fire up my USB hardrive. What I need is for my Xampp to just pick up from where I left off at my Windows Desktop, I'm just wondering if this achievable? Or if I'm going the wrong way about it?

What I tried today was changing the document root of httpd.conf to my USB files directory. This actually worked great, it showed all my sites, except I was getting MySQL errors. I did however copy them across, but windows and mac Xampp are different where they store these databases it seems. Mac is in the var folder of Xampp and the Windows xampp databases are elsewhere.

I could do this the manual way of each time I go from my Windows machine > Macbook I could copy the files and drag the exported databases with me, but this is time consuming for every time I just want to quickly move from one machine to the next.

What I'm essentially asking if there is a way to solve my above problem about moving from Windows Desktop to Macbook on a USB external hardrive in the quickest way possible.

Any insight would be great and I'm open to suggestions that people use in my situation.

Answer 1

Or, big or here, you could work everything off of FTP. This may or may not provide you with what you need, but your reasoning behind wanting to bring your files/databases to multiple servers on multiple platforms was not explained. Here's an example:

At my home I have my Windows PC. At work I have my OS X PC. XAMPP is installed on Windows. I have Dreamweaver CS6 on BOTH computers, as I work from both, but serve at home before it's ready to go to the testing server.

Set your Apache and Filezilla ports to run off of wild, never used ports.

Example, open up the XAMPP Configuration of Control panel by clicking on Config. Then click the button marked Service and Port Settings.

A new box will open and be on the Apache tab. Change the port to something random, such as 11111. Then click the Filezilla tab, and change it to something random, like 11113. Restart XAMPP.

Give your XAMPP server machine a static IP Adress. Open up your router config and go to port forwarding. Forward ports 11111 and 11112 to your XAMPP servers IP. Now, if your ISP has static IP's (as it doesn't likely have) you can go to your external IP address in a browser, such as:

http://x.x.x.x:11111/

That will serve your XAMPP served files the exact same as if you had typed in http://localhost/

If you dont have a static IP from your ISP, you can use DynDNS services.

Now, on your other PC, all you have to do is mount an FTP address as a volume. This will allow you to manipulate any files you may need. You can even install phpMyAdmin to manipulate your databases from a web browser if needed

For my OSX I use MACFusion http://macfusionapp.org/

I believe you can do this in Windows natively from Map Network Drive or Add Network Location. Just remember to specify your wonky port of 11113 for FTP