Hosting TOOLS : trouble-shooting

If you are hosting TOOLS yourself, on your school server, and hit a problem, the following comments from schools who solved their problems, may be useful:

-- Apache and mySQL posed problems on my Win 10 PC.   I setup a Mac with the XAMPP application and set the permission on the data folders to 'Everyone' read/write and the Tools web app worked straight away.

-- We have just 4 students who won't import.   For some reason, I had student names in Options longer than the max. field lengths in the MySQL database, which therefore didn’t import.  Once I shortened the names, they imported fine.

-- I got a complaint about this line in the PHP:  "matchedUsers = mysqli_fetch_all($_Recordset1);"
The solution was that the MySQLi extension was installed but not with the MySQLND driver: http://php.net/manual/en/book.mysqlnd.php
This is required for the function mysqli_fetch_all()

-- I got a message about "mysqli" but found the answer here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6694437/mysqli-fetch-all-not-a-valid-function

-- I had to change the “$optser = …” line in ‘myconnect.php’ to this:
$optser = @mysqli_connect($hostname, $username, $password, $database);

-- "I’ve used another web server and it’s now worked. So it’s something missing from my preferred server."

-- If you get the error message “HTTP Error 500” or similar, when you try to login to TOOLS, try the following, in order:
- 1)  Make sure that you have full permissions to read / write / create tables and data in your MySQL database.
- 2)  If your server has PHP version 7 or higher, then make sure you are using TOOLS version 5.0 or higher.
- 3)  Check that you have the mysqli extension installed.  This is needed to connect to the MySQL database. Most PHP set-ups usually install it as a must-have extension in MySQL & PHP setups.  More details here: http://php.net/manual/en/book.mysqli.php
- 4)  Check that you have the mysqlnd driver installed.  This is required for the function mysqli_fetch_all().   More details here: http://php.net/manual/en/book.mysqlnd.php

-- "I needed to set the permission on the data folders to 'Everyone' read/write".

-- "I had to make sure TOOLS has permission to read/write/create files in the Windows downloads folder and in the folder where Options is stored (C:\OptWin by default) and its subfolders".

      Alternatively, we can host TOOLS for you - see here.