07 January 2009, 13:04

I've read that Mahara is not supported on windows, however I thought that Mahara 1.1 will.  I have not been able to get Mahara 1.1 (beta version 2) running. 

I've been trying to test Maraha 1.1 on Windows Vista with IIS 8.  I am thinking that my config file is not correct. 

Has anybody else been able to get Mahara to work on Windows?

 Thanks

Steve

07 January 2009, 14:11

I don't think any work has been done on making Mahara 1.1 work on Windows, where did you read that?

Unfortunately,  as far as I know, so far there hasn't been any funding for Mahara developers to support Windows.  We don't really have many Windows machines at our disposal (I don't have access to a single one, for instance ;) ) and therefore supporting Windows is quite hard.

Your best bet is to do exactly what you've done - ask on the forums and maybe someone has had better luck than you, but no, it's not officially supported.

Good luck!

07 January 2009, 17:55

> I don't think any work has been done on making Mahara 1.1 work on Windows, where did you read that?

 There has been work done that indirectly will make it work better - removal of dependence on the file program. But yes, we haven't tested Mahara on Windows and are not going to be claiming that 1.1 "supports" running on windows, nor that we will "support" installations running on windows. In particular, using IIS is probably going to lead to failure.

08 January 2009, 17:48

I've setup it under Vista with IIS 7.0 this afternoon just for the fun of it .

In fact, it's taken me more time to setup PHP to run under IIS 7.0 (the PHP docs don't reflect the new configurations) and specially Postgres 8.3.5 (the installer package simply doesn't work with the Spanish version of Vista, and I've had to do most of the service setup by hand) than to setup Mahara itself.

The first hurdle is the installation loop. In init.php, when we check whether we are being installed , we check the value of $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']. The check uses Unix-like path separators and IIS puts Windows-like path separators in that value, so the check fails and we get a nice infinite loop.

Using something like the following instead:

// check to see if we're installed...
$scriptfilename = str_replace('\\', '/', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']);
if (!get_config('installed')
    && false === strpos($scriptfilename, 'admin/index.php')
    && false === strpos($scriptfilename, 'admin/upgrade.php')
    && false === strpos($scriptfilename, 'admin/upgrade.json.php')) {
    redirect('/admin/');
}
 

does the trick and allows the installation to finish successfully.

Then everything seems to work, but I haven't tested every single feature at all. If we are using 1.0.x, in addition to the above change, we need to patch get_mime_type() in lib/file.php with the patch attached to bug #700 (in addition to installting the files mentionned in the bug).

Saludos. Iñaki.

08 January 2009, 20:53

For fun?? If you say so...

I applied your change to 1.0_STABLE and master. It at least doesn't hurt the *nix support . Thanks!

07 January 2009, 19:08

Penny's point about funding is an important one. We'd really like to have Windows support for Mahara - it's high on the priority list but as an open source project we are reliant on  funding or the community resourcing different parts of the project. Microsoft actually funded Windows support for Moodle...I think we're more likely to get there if a group of universities wanted to collectively contribute.

cheers
Richard

07 January 2009, 17:56

Hi Steve,

Your problem might not be related to windows, especially if it's just a config file problem. Could you describe your problem in more detail, and include relevant config snippets and messages you see on the screen?

07 January 2009, 19:59

First Thanks all for responding. 

1.  I know you said your not officialy supporting windows yet.  I did get the Idea that version 1.1 should work on windows from your install guide.  I am evaluating to see what it would take to use mahara on windows and willing to dig in to see.

2. To answer your question Nigel, there are no errors that actually pop up, my web page just keep spinning until it times out.  That's the reason why I think it's a configuration setting.  I must be missing something.  Here are some of my questions:

A:  In Mahara 1.1 there are 2 config files "config-defaults" which is more like in version 1.0 and config-dist which contain a lot less information, which one should I use for the base of my config.php?

B: I am using PHP 5.2.6 for windows and based on your instal instructions some PHP extenstion you have list are not available.  Here are the one's that I didn't see was available to install on windows. 

• json
• libxml
• SimpleXML
• session
• Optionally: imagick

C: I am using MySQL version 5.0 and have set up the database according to the install instructions. - Just fyi.

D: What should the dataroot file path look like?  Should it be an actual separate directory?  I changed my config file to the following:

$cfg->dataroot = 'I:\mahara\maharadata';

 Thanks

Steve

07 January 2009, 21:12

Hi Steve,

If the page keeps spinning until time out, you might want to have a look in your apache error log and see if there are any messages in there.

You should copy config-dist.php, not config-defaults.php.

The json extension is built into php from 5.2 onwards so you don't have to worry about that one. As for the others, you might have them already - if you make a phpinfo() page you can see what extensions you have available.

MySQL - make sure your version of MySQL 5 is at least as big as what the install instructions say (5.0.32 I think?)

Your dataroot file path - yes it needs to be an actual separate directory that is not inside the mahara codebase (e.g. inside the htdocs directory or whatever you renamed that to). It needs to be writable by whatever user the web server runs as too - I'm not sure how that unix permission idea applies to windows though.

08 January 2009, 18:15

It needs to be writable by whatever user the web server runs as too - I'm not sure how that unix permission idea applies to windows though.

With IIS, you need to grant "Modify" permission to the IUSR_Machinename (IIS 5.x or 6.x) or IUSR (IIS 7.0) account. That should do it.

Saludos. Iñaki.