Composer and Wamp – Unable to find the socket transport “ssl”

Just a quick post after something regarding wamp I completely forgot about.

I was using composer to install a fresh copy of Silverstripe 3, which worked fine until I tried to use composer to search packagist for related packages:

[code]composer search silverstripe[/code]

The console came back with the following error:

[code]
The “http://packagist.org/search.json?q=silverstripe” file could not be downloaded: failed to open stream: Unable to find the socket transport “ssl” – did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?
[/code]

Using the wamp tray icon, I had enabled openssl under php extensions, and ssl under apache modules. My phpinfo was showing ssl under Registered Stream Socket Transports. So what was the problem?

Googling the error specific to wamp netted very little, until I came across a post that reminded me that wamp, by default, has two php.ini files. One located in /bin/php/[version]/, and another located in /bin/apache/[version]/bin. Apache (e.g. using php through a browser) uses the former ini file. Which is why I saw no problem in my phpinfo.

Depending on how your PATH is set on Windows, php-cli uses the latter ini file. On manually checking this file, I found that openssl was not enabled. And enabling it allowed the above composer command to work fine.

Note to self – Work out a unified php.ini usage so I only have to rely on one configuration.

Installing PEAR and PHPUnit on Windows 7 (WAMP)

Just a quick and dirty walkthrough for the end goal of installing PHPUnit on a Windows 7 machine running WAMP. These steps should be fine for other versions of Windows and WAMP. Really the structure of the stack does not have a huge impact on the installation of both PEAR and PHPUnit.

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Setting up Symfony2 on a Windows 7 Environment

So, I’ve put it off long enough. I’ve been in this development game for near on 10 years and have yet to delve into the world of full stack MVC frameworks. The closest I have come so far is extensive Silverstripe CMS development, which hinges on it’s own framework dubbed Silverstripe Framework (formally known as sapphire).

Now, in coalition with another personal project, I’ve decided to take the plunge and learn what all the hype is about with this Symfony2 thing. This, of course starts with building a development environment on my Windows 7 machine, so I have documented what I have learned along the way for future reference for others. So here is my environment:

  • XAMPP server stack
  • Symfony2 standard (no vendors)
  • Netbeans IDE

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