This is a public repository of the UK Pinball League site, originally created and maintained by Nick Hill until 2021 where the maintenance was passed on to a new group of enthusiasts!
XAMPP is recommended for installing Apache and PHP onto the development environment. Once installed it is recommended to update the PATH to include a direct path to php.exe (by default installed to C:\xampp\php)
The site requires a Microsoft plugin to connect to SQL Server with PHP. This can be obtained following instructions here to obtain a zip file containing the Windows drivers
Then as broadly documented here
from the zip, copy the files php_sqlsrv_81_ts_x64.dll and php_pdo_sqlsrv_81_ts_x64.dll to C:\xampp\php\ext (assuming xampp installed to default folder, and developing on Windows x64 architecture). Then edit the php.ini file (C:\xampp\php\php.ini) to initialise the extensions when using PHP by adding the following line (typically into the Dynamic Extensions section)
extension=php_sqlsrv_81_ts_x64
extension=php_pdo_sqlsrv_81_ts_x64
The following environment variables are required to run the php site locally (and examples show setting these with Powershell). It is assumed the developer is running the site on a local instance of SQL Server, and so should be able to configure the host/username/password.
New-Item Env:/currentseason -Value "15" # Current season number
New-Item Env:/mssqlservername -Value "dbhost.database.windows.net" # sql server database host name
New-Item Env:/mssqldb -Value "dbname" # sql db name
New-Item Env:/mssqluser -Value "readonlylogin" # username for sql db
New-Item Env:/mssqlpassword -Value "sqlpassword" # password for sql db
The following are temporarily required for some legacy pages which use the old/denormalised database scheme, hosted in MySQL
New-Item Env:/sqlhost -Value "legacydbhost.mysql.database.azure.com" # legacy mysql db host name
New-Item Env:/dbname -Value "legacydbname" # legacy mysql db name
New-Item Env:/sqluser -Value "legacyuser" # username for legacy mysql db
New-Item Env:/sqlpassword -Value "legacypassword" # password for legacy mysql db
Script can then launch the site by ensuring we are in the root folder and running php:
cd C:\site-folder
php -S 127.0.0.1:9876
Microsoft SQL Server is used in production. Sql Server Express is suitable for local (and free) hosting in a development environment. The SQL database is backed up infrequently and stored to the repository in bacpac format. Please DO NOT submit database changes (either schema or data) to the repository.
Database schema is documented here
At the time of writing, maintenance on the database is performed manually. Example queries can be seen here