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 only need to upload all files including the folder _setup, navigate with your browser to http://yourserver/yourcombu/_setup and complete both the configuration file section and the database tables creation.

You can skip the configuration file section if you already configured it locally, in this case you will edit lib/config.php for the database connection and root URL defines (URL_ROOT, GAME_DB_SERVER, GAME_DB_NAME, GAME_DB_USER and GAME_DB_PASS), as explained in the tutorial video.

After the configuration file has been eventually edited and the database tables are created, you should delete the folder _setup from your production server.

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. 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)
3. Start both HTTP and MySQL services (if you're using XAMPP, it can be done through the XAMPP Control Panel else from Windows Services)
4. Create an empty database with name combu (or any other name of your choice) in phpMyAdmin (in XAMPP it's usually installed at http://localhost/phpmyadmin) or MySQL Workbench (here is a tutorial about how to use Workbench from Guru99).
5. 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) and use your web browser to navigate to http://yourserver/combu_folder_path/_setup (for example http://localhost/combu/_setup) to generate the content for your configuration file (located at /lib/config.php) and the SQL queries to create the tables on your database.

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.

Continue to Server and Client configuration.