Ubuntu – Make Linux and Windows share localhost (webserver) files and database

dual-bootwebserver

I'd like to have ubuntu and windows share my htdocs and mysql databases for local development. This isn't a web-facing site, just for personal development use. Is there a way to do this? Is this a terrible idea?

Best Answer

When I first did this I had a lot of problems getting my LAMP stack to play nice with my WAMP stack - I got a lot of "you're not allowed to access this" errors when I navigated to localhost.

I tried various apache virtual host configurations, none of which allowed me access to the files.

What worked was to use mount --bind to put my windows folders into the corresponding linux folders. If this works, you'll notice the default ubuntu landing page for localhost replaced with the "it works" from windows. Note that any linux files will be hidden by windows files with the same name.

I have an fstab entry that mounts my windows partition to /media/windows.

The solution was to

Mount and Bind the files into the correct locations:

First, make an "upstart file" with these contents as mentioned here.

Run this in terminal:

gksu gedit /etc/init/mount-bind.conf

Paste this into it, changing the ... to the path to your htdocs. Obviously, test these commands in terminal to be sure you have the paths right. The linux file locations are the important bit.

#
# bind mounts
#

description "bind"

start on stopped mountall 

script 

   mount --bind '/media/windows/.../htdocs' /var/www/html
   mount --bind '/media/windows/ProgramData/MySQL/MySQL Server 5.5/data' /var/lib/mysql

end script

With these two commands I got close, but InnoDB was preventing mysql from starting. The problem is the InnoDB log file size check. An easy solution is to have one OS use a different log file than the other. Otherwise only the most recent os will start mysql. You could also delete the files every time you start or shutdown, but it's easier just to keep separate logs. They share changes just fine, just not log files.

Change MySQL log file location

In Ubuntu, in /etc/mysql/my.cnf, add this line in the InnoDB section:

innodb_log_group_home_dir = /var/log/mysql

That solved it for me.

Caveat: linux is more "case-sensitivey" than windows. Where windows will happily go grab an image with different capitalization and serve it, linux won't. Of course, real web developers always are exact in their capitalization.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Whats the simplest way to edit and add files to “/var/www”

If you make /var/www writeable by its group and add the user to the group, that user will not have to use sudo. Try this:

sudo adduser <username> www-data
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
sudo chmod -R g+rwX /var/www

The user should then be able to edit /var/www/ files without hassle.

The first line adds the user to the www-data group, the second line clears up any files with messed up ownership, and the third makes it so that all users who are members of the www-data group can read and write all files in /var/www.

If you are logged in as <username> you need to log out and log back in for the group membership to take effect.

Ubuntu – share MySql database files with Windows on dual boot

Yes, it works but with some quirks. MySQL uses the same fileformats across platforms so all you need is to share the data directory. One problem is that the data directory need to have mysql as owner and group in ubuntu. And Windows is case-insensitive and Linux is case-sensitive so keep all names uniform: either the whole name lowercase or uppercase but do not mix them.

From start to finish; if you already have things set up this might need some tweaking to fit your setup:

Install and setup MySQL on both systems.
Stop the mysql server if it is running.
Make a new NTFS partition. Mark the device name (let's call it sdXN for now).
Move the mysql data directory from Ubuntu to the new partition.
```
mkdir /{mountpoint}/mysql_data
sudo mv /var/lib/mysql /{mountpoint/mysql_data
```
using mv saves permissions.
Make a new mysql directory
```
sudo mkdir /var/lib/mysql
```
Mount the NTFS partition at /var/lib/mysql. Change the devicename to what it got when you created the NTFS partition.
```
sudo mount /dev/{sdXN} /var/lib/mysql -t ntfs-3g -o uid=mysql,gid=mysql,umask=0077
```

To automount on boot find the partition UUID and locale and edit /etc/fstab.

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid
locale -a
sudo gedit /etc/fstab   
UUID={number_found_with_the_ls-l} /var/lib/mysql ntfs-3g uid=mysql,gid=mysql,umask=0077,locale={your_locale}.utf8  0  0

Change the 'datadir' path in /etc/mysql/my.cnf to point to /var/lib/mysql/mysql_data
Start the mysql server and test it.
Edit the Windows config file (my.ini) and set 'datadir' to X:/mysql_data (replace X: for where you mount it under Windows).

Compiled from topic 1442148 on UF.org.

_{I got the Ubuntu version working; so partly untested since I do not have Windows}