I’ve been experimenting with XAMPP as a way to setup a temporary and transportable Apache install with PHP, MySQL, and a database admin tool (phpMyAdmin). Before starting, be sure to have Sun J2EE 5.x SDK (or higher) installed.

As mentioned on PortableApps.com, by following the “Installation” without the installer instructions, XAMPP will run from a removable drive (I’m using an SD card, myself–quite a bit slower than other options, but VERY cheap).

First, I downloaded the ZIP package from from the xampp for windows page:

Open the xampp-win32-*.*.*.zip file that was just downloaded and extract to C: (change to flash drive drive letter here if necessary).

Run [drive]:xamppxampp_start.exe to test starting up the web server and mysql.
Run [drive]:xamppxampp_stop.exe to shut the web server and mysql down again.

Next download the Apache Tomcat plug-in from the XAMPP for Windows Add-Ons area.

Extract this .zip file into to the c:xampp folder (again, substitute c: for appropriate drive letter if necessary). You should get a “Confile File Overwrite” prompt when you do this–the Tomcat files should overwrite the original xampp files, so select [Yes to All].

After the Tomcat files have been extracted, run [drive]:xamppsetup_xampp.bat to setup Tomcat.

Test the installation by running

• [drive]:xamppxampp_start.exe to start xampp, then
• [drive]:xampptomcat_start.bat to start Tomcat.
• Browse to http://localhost:8080, which should be something like the following:

Finally download JSPWiki (Current stable release):

Extract the JSPWiki.war file from the JSPWiki download and copy to the [drive]:xampptomcatwebapps folder.

Run [drive]:xampptomcat_stop.bat and then [drive]:xampptomcat_start.bat to restart Tomcat. Web application JSPWiki should get loaded as part of the restart. I had to restart a second time (probably started too soon after shutting down.)

Browse to http://localhost:8080/JSPWiki to view the JSPWiki page. You will be prompted to begin installation:

For the installation options, I used:

• Application name – JSPWiki
• BaseURL – http://localhost:8080/JSPWiki/
• Page Storage – /p/web/www-data/jspwiki/ (default) — note that this will be the path off of your root drive wherever xampp and Tomcat are running from. This is where the wiki pages will be stored.
• All other options – default values

Finally:

• Press [Configure!]
• [drive]:xampptomcat_stop.bat to stop Tomcat.
• [drive]:xampptomcat_start.bat to start Tomcat.
• Browse to http://localhost:8080/JSPWiki/ to start using your JSPWiki. By default, versioning is turned on, which is accomplished by storing every version of the file in an “OLD” folder just off the main page storage folder.

Troubleshooting JSPWiki Installation

Update 2008.12.26:

One of the downsides of installing JSPWiki on xampp on a flash drive or SD card is that these drives are typically formatted with FAT32.

For the default installation of xampp with the Apache Tomcat plugin and JSPWiki on a 2 GB drive:

• 6,499 files and 853 folders
• Size:  281 MB (295,406,845 bytes)
• Size on Disk:  436 MB (457,834,496 bytes)

The additional size on disk is due to the 65,536 allocation unit limit on FAT32, which means the smallest amount of space that a file can take up on a 2 GB partition is 32K.

Since JSPWiki stores each page and each version of a page in a separate file, even a relatively small wiki would take up more space.