Web server setup

Table of Contents

• Live server
• Local machine
• Server and Client configuration

In this section you will learn how to setup a web server on your local machine and install Combu.

Live server

Combu will work correctly in almost every hosting provider, since the production servers are usually configured correctly. So in production environment you'll only need to create the database on MySQL (and execute the file combu_db.sql into it) and edit the file lib/config.php in your Combu folder (that is the constants GAME_DB_SERVER, GAME_DB_NAME, GAME_DB_USER and GAME_DB_PASS), as explained in the tutorial video.

Local machine

Before using a live server you may want to test your game earlier and work locally on your machine, in this case you have few alternatives (Microsoft IIS, Apache, XAMPP, etc) and what's to get only depends on your expertise and skills.

1. For the sake of this sample we will assume you have installed XAMPP, it's a well-known free package that contains both the web server Apache and the MySQL server engine (it exists few similar packages, like LAMPP, they're almost the same for this example)
2. Edit the file php.ini (if you're using XAMPP then it's usually located in the folder xamppfiles/etc) and assign the value On to the variable short_open_tag (the line should look like: short_open_tag=On)
3. MySQL must be configured with case-sensitivity for table names, it's usually already configured on live servers by hosting providers; if you're running on your local Windows machine then edit the file my.ini (you'll find it in one of the folders inside XAMPP installation) and add a new line with lower_case_table_names=2 just below the line that contains [mysqld] (if you haven't the section [mysqld] then add both lines at the end of the file)
4. Start both HTTP and MySQL services (if you're using XAMPP, it can be done through the XAMPP Control Panel else from Windows Services)
5. Create an empty database with name combu, select/open it and execute the file combu_db.sql in phpMyAdmin (in XAMPP it's usually installed at http://localhost/phpmyadmin) or MySQL Workbench
6. Uncompress the file combu_web.zip into your local web server root (if you're using XAMPP then it's usually located in the folder xamppfiles/htdocs); if the database created in the previous step is not named combu then you'll need to edit the file lib/config.php and modify the value of the constant GAME_DB_NAME

Server and Client configuration

Now that you learned how to setup your web server and have installed Combu server, you can configure the system at your needs. Click here to get started.