Web Development for Students?

[angrycomputingteacher]

I'm not sure on which route to take for a web development server for the students. Many seem to use VMs but I think our machines would rapidly slow down. (2GB memory).

 

Then I was thinking of implementing something like XAMPP or WAMP as they seem to work well. The only issue would be that the students have no direct access to the C drive. Not sure whether I could share the folder out then create a mapped drive with a GPO to point to the //localhost/htdocs share. Any other way of doing this, before I go start implementing it.

[caffrey]

You can run xampp / wamp from a usb drive ? Just give the students one each ? Not sure if you restrict USB though, but you can work around that

[angrycomputingteacher]

You can run xampp / wamp from a usb drive ? Just give the students one each ? Not sure if you restrict USB though, but you can work around that

Instead of using individual memory sticks, could I be able to just put XAMPP into a shared folder? My only thought would be could multiple users use the same install at once?

[caffrey]

You could just set up an Apache server on some cheap hardware (or VM) in that case and give each user their own space ? e.g. Per-user web directories - Apache HTTP Server

[angrycomputingteacher]

Would I able for those users directories to point to a folder in user home drives?

[Blue_Cookeh]

Would I able for those users directories to point to a folder in user home drives?

 

You could do some clever trickery to do so. You could probably do it slightly easier with Windows, but I like the idea of having a Linux server running samba, joined to the domain. You could then share out the web root and assign each folder the relevant user's permissions. You could then have a shortcut to this in each user's home directory.

[mavhc]

Need to be more specific about what the students are going to do, control the server? Or just put files in a place it reads? What languages?

 

Could set the web server installed on each machine to default to h:\www or similar.

[caffrey]

You could do some clever trickery to do so. You could probably do it slightly easier with Windows, but I like the idea of having a Linux server running samba, joined to the domain. You could then share out the web root and assign each folder the relevant user's permissions. You could then have a shortcut to this in each user's home directory.

 

Was just about to say that

[angrycomputingteacher]

The students will just be making websites with PHP. They don't need access to files like php.ini. I'll try tomorrow to configure something like this on a Linux computer.

[angrycomputingteacher]

Managed to get the XAMPP solution to work. I created a mapped drive for //localhost/c$/XAMPP/htdocs. It seems to work very well.