Windows Installation Notes

Installing on Windows is no different from installing on Linux. The only difference is that you will need different PHP drivers and that the cron job (Task Scheduler in Windows) is setup differently.

Install Apache and PHP

You may install Apache and PHP directly or use XAMPP for a much easier setup.

You need not enable MariaDB during the XAMPP setup if you are going to use SQL Server as your database.

Check or Download XAMPP

Apache for Windows    PHP for Windows

Setup the site folder, local DNS and Apache

Setup the hostname you would want to use for your Watch My Domains Installation and configure your local DNS. Then create a web folder that will serve Watch My Domains SED from and configure Apache configuration (.conf) files as required.

ionCube loader

IonCube loader is required to run the trial and standard version installations of Watch My Domains SED. Typically this involves downloading a DLL, copying it to PHP extensions folder and then making an entry in the PHP.ini file.

zend_extension = "C:\xampp\php\ioncube\ioncube_loader_win_7.3.dll"

Get ionCube Loader

The download will contain multiple DLL files and you only need one. You should be able to identify the right file based on your Apache/PHP options.

You may need to configure a second PHP.ini used by the command line version. For example, the bin/php folder in WAMP installations will contain a php.ini that is used by PHP CLI.

Required PHP extensions

Here is a list of typical PHP extensions required for a working installation. You may not exactly need all of them depending on your specific setup requirements.

Core, bcmath, calendar, ctype, date, filter, hash, iconv, json, SPL, pcre, readline, session, standard, mysqlnd, tokenizer, zip, zlib, libxml, dom, PDO, bz2, SimpleXML, xml, wddx, xmlreader, xmlwriter, apache2handler, openssl, curl, fileinfo, gd, gettext, mbstring, mysqli, pdo_mysql, pdo_sqlite, ionCube Loader

Open the PHP.ini and check the various extensions that are being loaded. Make sure that the required drivers are enabled.

Download Watch My Domains SED

Download and unzip the files into your web folder that was setup in previous sections.

Download Watch My Domains SED Trial

Download Watch My Domains SED Pro

At this point, restart the apache browser and open the site / application in your browser. If everything is OK you should see the following.

SQLite

If you are installing for the first time on Windows, SQLite offers a quick initial setup. This will allow you to make sure that the parts other than the database are working. Once you have the SQLite version working you can change the database to one of MySQL/MariaDB, MS-SQL or PostgreSQL.

For SQLite you only need to provide a file name (on a folder that is writable) as the database name and make sure that the driver pdo_sqlite is enabled in PHP.ini

MySQL / MariaDB

Create the database and configure the DB user using either the command-line tool or phpMyAdmin. If you are using the command-line, the typical commands to create a user and database named wmdsed4 would look like

CREATE DATABASE wmdsed4;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wmdsed4.* TO "wmdsed4"@"localhost"
CREATE USER wmdsed4@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'thesecretpassword';

PHP Drivers

Make sure that either pdo_mysql or mysqli is enabled in PHP.ini. You should also edit the config.php file to specify the driver you want to use. The default configuration file assumes you will have pdo_mysql loaded.

SQL Server / SQL Express

Use SQL Server Studio or Transact-SQL to create a database that you would use for Watch My Domains SED. You will later specify this database name in the condig.php file of Watch My Domains SED.

The screen shot below shows a database named wmdsed4 and a user named sedlogin that has full access rights to wmdsed4.

Here are the Microsoft Documentations on this.

Create a Database

Create a Login

PHP Drivers

Make sure that you download the appropriate PHP driver for MS SQL Server. You should make sure to match the PHP version, thread safety and the architecture.

Microsoft Drivers for PHP

After you have downloaded the required PHP driver and copied it to your PHP installation's extension folder you should add an entry about it in the PHP.ini file. For example if you are using PHP 7.3 and have the thread safe PDO version, your PHP.ini entry will look like...

extension=php_pdo_sqlsrv_73_ts

Config.php Settings

Now you are ready to configure Watch My Domains SED. Go to the web folder you created and downloaded the application into.

Copy the config-extended-sample.php file at root to config.php and edit it's contents (in a text editor) to set $db_extended_config_name to mssql. Now change the 'mssql' block below it to include the database, user name and the MSSQL hostname.

Please see the screen shot below.

Scroll down some more in the editor and edit the following two lines.

$db_config_setup_name		= 'setup';
$db_config_setup_password	= 'secret';

Provide a suitable password here so that you can access the installation.

Save the 'config.php' file and exit the text editor.

Check if it Works

Open the application in a browser now and see if you get a login prompt. If everything is fine, you shouldbe able to login to the application using the credentials you setup in config.php.

Basic Diagnostic Tool

You can run the basic diagnostic tool by opening

http://server/<installation folder>/verify.php

in your browser. For example, if your installation is at example.com/wmdsed50 you should open

http://example.com/wmdsed50/verify.php

Setup Task Scheduler

It is very important that you setup a task scheduler to do the lookup queue processing. Without this the application will not work.

The cron.php script needs to run every minute. Please don't change the cron interval to anything other than one minute.

Task Scheduler Setup