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Portable Tiny Nginx/PHP/MariaDB Webserver for Windows

By Site Administrator · Sep 29, 2026 · 2 views

Tired of heavy, bloated local development stacks? Portable Tiny Webserver is a lightweight, fully self-contained local development environment for Windows. Built using Nginx, PHP, and MariaDB, it runs entirely out of a single directory with zero Windows registry bloat—making it completely portable across drives or machines.

📂 Directory Structure

To get started, create a root directory (for example, D:\www\). Inside this folder, organize your components as follows:

  • /app — Your web application source code directory.

  • /db — Contains your database manager (includes a DB admin script and the DB-Admin-Migration-Manual.pdf).

  • /sys — Houses all core server binaries and configuration files.

🛠️ Step 1: Download & Extract Binaries

Download the required Windows executables and extract them into their respective directories under /sys/:

  1. MariaDB (v12.3.3): Extract into D:\www\sys\mariadb\mariadb12.3.3

    (Reference: MariaDB 12.3.3 Release Notes)

  2. PHP (v8.5.10): Extract into D:\www\sys\php\php8.5.10

  3. Nginx (v1.30.5): Extract into D:\www\sys\nginx\nginx-1.30.5

    (Reference: Nginx 1.30.5 Release)

⚙️ Step 2: Configuration

  1. Locate the configuration directory at sys\conf\.

  2. Ensure all three .ini/.conf files are placed here.

  3. Important: Update the paths inside all configuration files to match your custom root directory path (e.g., changing D:/www/ to match your actual installation path).

You can test your Nginx configuration via command prompt:

DOS
nginx.exe -t -c D:/www/sys/conf/nginx.conf

🚀 Step 3: Initialize & Run

1. Initialize the Database

Make sure the sys/data directory is completely empty before running this step (run only once):

DOS
cd /d D:\www\sys\mariadb\mariadb12.3.3\bin
mariadb-install-db.exe --datadir="D:/www/sys/data"

2. Start and Stop the Server

  • To Start: Run start.exe

  • To Stop: Run stop.exe

🗄️ Step 4: Database Setup & Management

  1. Read db/DB-Admin-Migration-Manual.pdf to learn how to set up database passwords and adjust security settings (Default password: admin123).

  2. Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080/db/ to configure your application's database using the built-in single-database manager.

Enjoy your ultra-fast, portable Nginx/PHP/MariaDB development environment and start building apps instantly!

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