Three steps forward, two and one-half steps back regarding the Installation of GIT/VirtualBox/Vagrant as instructed by the 2017 Site Point Book “PHP & mySQL: From Novice to Ninja”.
Novice am I, and still waiting to get more than a meter from the starting gate, have this nice ditty:
After spending about an hour trying different iterations and searching on this forum for this problem, I now inquire:
MAY I JUST USE WINDOWS GUI EXPORER TO CREATE, MODIFY, AND DESTROY DIRECTORIES…???
In other words: Its it going to be to my detriment if I use other than Vagrant.VIrtualBoxGti et al. to do all tree/directory stuff.
As it says in the book, you’re better off doing this using git bash which is why you’re getting the syntax errors but to answer your question, yes, you can just create the directories using Windows Explorer (or whatever it’s called these days).
I agree with Tom. Although there are other ways than Vagrant and XAMPP, following along with the book is best. If there are steps that you have to do that requires you to use Vagrant, then you are stuck. For instance, if you are required to install a package using Vagrant and you can’t do it on XAMPP, then you are out of luck. You should really be following the book and not some kind of tutorial on the internet.
XAMPP is not something you should also be using because XAMPP is highly opiniated. If VirtualBox does not open, then uninstall it and reinstall it. Then install the necessary drivers and it should be working.
I know I’ve expressed my opinion before, but I still feel the same.
If it comes down to not using XAMPP and not being able to get started with PHP, or using XAMPP as a last resort to be able to get started with PHP, then using XAMPP is better than nothing. At least until most of the basics have been learned.
Of course there will likely be problems when / if the localhost files are moved to a live host, so using XAMPP is “deferring pain” and some things will need to be “unlearned”. But I can understand that some may to prefer to tackle different skill sets at different stages of their growth as a developer. i.e. one steep learning curve at the beginning vs. several learning curves spread out.
A note of caution, if you are following a tutorial but not following the steps as they were given, expect to have problems. You may end up learning a lot if you can solve the problems. In fact, you may learn more than if you had quickly ran through the tutorial without understanding why it was doing certain things a certain way. But do expect problems.
