Safari can't open installer :(

Installation
1

Hi everyone ! I’m a newbie with all this.

I have downloaded and installed MAMP >Made the Gibbon folder in hotdocs folder. But when I click on Gibbon I’m getting this error:
Safari can’t open the page “localhost/gibbon/installer/install.php” because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection.

I have spent hours since yesterday trying to find the solution and searching these forums but can’t move on. Please help :frowning:

2

MAMP? I believe there is very little knowledge in the community using this.

Best chances to get support here is to use a LAMP system. :slight_smile:

3
MAMP? I believe there is very little knowledge in the community using this.

Best chances to get support here is to use a LAMP system. :slight_smile:

The installation video is of MAMP only :frowning:
But anyways, can i install LAMP on MacOS?

4

Actually, MAMP is in use in the community for development, so perhaps we can help. LAMP is my preferred choice for server hosting, but as my school uses Mac, I use MAMP locally.

When MAMP is first installed, the HTTP port is set to 8080, in order to avoid clashes with other servers on the system using the well-known port 80. So, you could try:

http://localhost:8080/gibbon/installer/install.php

Or, use MAMP’s Preferences to change the port to 80. The latter is my preferred choice.

Hope this helps!

5

So i made some progress and i’ll share my findings for others who might be novices like me:

I abandoned the plan of installing on my Mac using MAMP.
I installed XAMP from ApacheFriends site as described in the “Getting Started” guide.
Of course i installed the latest one from the landing page with php 7.4 which is where i got all the problems.
I did try to change the php version to 7.3 initially- doing all sorts of unmentionable things (i still don’t know what php does :stuck_out_tongue: ) . I got so frustrated that i looked up other opesource software.

Finally- i uninstalled the latest version of XAMP, deleted the folder with the left over folders.
Instead downloaded the older version of XAMP with php 7.3.15 from https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html
Made a new folder “Gibbon” in the htdocs folder of XAMP and extracted the gibbon zip file contents into this folder.
So far so good.

Next problem was nothing was happening when i clicked the submit button after typing the database name (root) and entering the password i guess would be the password (no it is not your computer password :smiley: )
The issue was that since I installed the webserver using XAMP instead of typing out all the stuff myself, there never was a password to begin with.
So i googled and found this very nice person has explained how to create the password for the database. https://www.webucator.com/how-to/how-install-start-test-xampp-on-windows-setup-of-introduction-php.cfm

And that’s how it worked.

TL;DR
Install XAMP php 7.3.15–>create password for SQL database → submit

6

PS: I used my Windows laptop instead

7

Hi flygye12, wow, well done on some amazing troubleshooting, and welcome to the world of system admin! Remember, systems like MAMP and XAMP are intended to make this process easy…at least compared to installing and configuring all the packages individually. That said, do it a few times, get some concepts straight in your head, and it all becomes much easier.

Thanks for sharing your solution. A couple of notes:

  • PHP stands for PHP: Hypter Preprocessor, and does what the name says: it is a programming language that is pre-processed into HTML on the server-side, which is then shared with a client as a static page. This compares to JavaScript, for example, which is processed on the client-side. There are other server-side languages, such as ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby On Rails, etc.
  • Gibbon does not accept a blank database password, as this is very poor security practice. XAMP comes with a blank password by default, and MAMP with a very weak one, in order to speed up local deployments for development and testing. Neither of these platforms are design for production use.

I hope things are smoother for you now that you have your server configured, and Gibbon installed. Check out our Getting Started guide, and let us know if you need any help.

Welcome to the Gibbon community : ) Ross