Moving Xampp htdocs to My Documents

From a previous post you would know I'm using Xampp as my preferred test server to run Serendipity so I can develop my themes, type articles and experiment with plugins without actually doing any of this on my real website.

Problem is when you're editing image files, or constantly opening and closing the stylesheet or one of the .tpl files in the templates section it can be really painful to have to go back and forth between My Documents and the htdocs folder within Xampp. Windows Explorer is not the best file manager I've ever used, and saving locations as bookmarks doesn't always remove the frustration. Also, because I use the Gimp as my preferred image editing program, and its designed for the Linux system, everytime I want to save something I have to go through a painful series of clicks to get from My Documents to htdocs.

Well its been annoying me like you wouldn't believe, and then I stumbled across something in the Apache documentation that made me wonder if I could move htdocs to My Documents, and you can. Yeehah! You have to edit a file known as httpd.conf within 'c:\program files\xampp\apache\conf'. Do a find [Ctrl-F] for DocumentRoot. It should only be listed twice. At both locations change the path from the Xampp directory to a new directory (I created a folder called www) in My Documents, now save and close this file. Next, copy everything from your htdocs folder to the new folder you created in My Documents, open the Xampp Server Control Panel and restart Apache.

Test this by changing something in one of the files in your new location, it should work, and also means no more going back and forth between program files and My Documents when you're working on one of your websites.