Having to spend more time working in a Windows environment has been heart-breaking, but I’ve been able to find work-arounds for most of Windows’ shortcomings, including Windows’ lack of adequate symbolic link functionality for use with web development.
For a new web project, I usually create a symbolic link in the DocumentRoot directory which points to the project’s development files. Then I just visit http://myserver/projectname to check my progress. However, Windows doesn’t support symbolic links. The solution is to use an Alias directive in my Apache configuration file. Aliases are enabled by the mod_alias Apache module.
In this case, I wanted to create a directory for new vWorker projects, so I created the directory and added the directive:
Alias /vworker "C:/Users/ghodmode/dev/vworker"
If that’s the only change I make, then it’s likely that I’ll get a 403 HTTP Error Page (Access Forbidden) when I try to view the files, so I’ll also need to add a block to the configuration file that allows the HTTP server to serve files from the directory:
<Directory "C:/Users/ghodmode/dev/vworker"> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from all RewriteEngine on </Directory>
That’s probably a little less secure than it should be for a production server, but this is a development server and it isn’t accessible from the Internet. The important line is “Allow from all”.
Now just restart the HTTP server and visit the page.