How to resolve APXS issues with XAMPP

In my continuing efforts to use The Smith Engine to the best of my ability, I've been attempting to install Tomcat so that I can run CF on port 80. The fine folks on the Smith team have provided this page with directions for downloading and installing Tomcat, the Apache-Tomcat connector, and so on.

The URLs they provide for file download are wrong — they 404. You probably want this url for the correct version of Tomcat, and here's a url for the tomcat connector that actually works as I'm writing this. You can get current URL's by checking this page and this page, respectively. Note that you want the "core" distribution of Tomcat.

The instructions from Smith don't mention that there is a new version of Tomcat available, and based on the chart under the Tomcat Versions heading of the Tomcat home page, I'm guessing you want to stick with Tomcat 5.5 — because if Smith required 6.x for the latest Servlet/JSP spec functionality, then the documentation would probably use 6.x as an example. I suppose it might work with 6.x, but I grabbed the latest 5.5.x and it works for me.

Once you've got the files downloaded and you start to configure, the first problem you'll run into is that the Smith documentation assumes you're using "standard" apache. Since you're using XAMPP, your paths are different. Ok, so where do we find apxs when using XAMPP? Here: /opt/lampp/bin/apxs — assuming you installed XAMPP to the standard location of /opt. Wherever you installed it, the path would then be [install path]/lampp/bin/apxs

However, you'll probably run into errors (like this guy) that looks like this:

...
need to check for Perl first, apxs depends on it...
checking for perl... /usr/bin/perl
could not find /opt/lampp/bin/apxs
configure: error: You must specify a valid --with-apxs path

To resolve this, you'll need the developer package for XAMPP. You can find a current link for that right here — but as of right now, you can just use this URL. To be honest, I'm not perfectly clear on why you need the developer package, because apxs is at the location you're specifying. My best guess is that supporting files aren't in place or that the version of apxs included is incorrect or incomplete. Either way, simply unpacking the developer package into your /opt folder puts whatever needs to be in place into place, and the configure command will work.

Then just make, make install, and you're off running… through the rest of the instructions.

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