Start all, Stop all and Restart Apache in Server by Zaweba

Three services make up a working local site: Apache to serve pages, MariaDB to hold the data and Mailpit to catch the mail. The Services menu in Server by Zaweba looks after all three at once. It has four commands: Start all, Stop all, Restart Apache and Check ports. Most days you only touch the first two, and the control panel's status lights tell you the result.

Start all

Start all brings up Apache, MariaDB and Mailpit in one go. Before anything starts, the ports the services need are checked, so if another program already holds one you hear about it then, with the name of the program and a free port to use instead, rather than a service failing quietly. Once the services are running, each card on the control panel shows a status light, its ports, its process id and the last lines of its log.

If you always want the services running, Settings has an option to start them as soon as the app opens, and another to start Server when you sign in to Windows. Start all is the manual version of the same thing, for days when you only need the server for an hour.

Stop all, and why it takes a moment

Stop all shuts everything down. MariaDB is given up to 20 seconds to shut down cleanly, finishing writes and closing its files, before it is forced. That pause is deliberate: a database stopped mid write is the commonest way to end up with a damaged table, and a few seconds' wait is a fair price for not having to repair one.

Stop all is worth using at the end of a session even though the services only listen on your own PC. It frees the ports for anything else you run, and it means the next Start all begins from a clean state.

Restart Apache

Restart Apache is the one you reach for after changing something by hand, or when a site behaves oddly and you want to rule out a stuck process. Most changes made inside the app don't need it. Switching a site's PHP version, changing PHP settings or turning HTTPS on all apply with a graceful Apache restart on their own, and every configuration change is tested first, so a bad configuration leaves the running server alone.

A graceful restart lets requests already in progress finish before the new configuration takes over, so a page you are loading at the time doesn't simply fail. The per service Restart buttons on the control panel cards do the same job one service at a time.

Nothing left running behind your back

Each service runs inside its own Windows job. That is a Windows feature that ties a group of processes together, and Server by Zaweba uses it so that when the app exits, or even if it crashes, Windows closes the services with it. You don't come back hours later to find a database still holding port 3306, or an orphaned web server that stops the next start.

The services are not installed as Windows services either. They run while the app is open or sitting in the notification area, and that is all. If you close the window to the tray, the tray menu can start or stop everything or exit the app, which stops the services too.

A short routine

Open the app and choose Start all, or let it start the services for you. Glance at the lights. Work on your sites. If you edit Apache's behaviour by hand, use Restart Apache. When you finish, Stop all or exit the app. If a light stays off after Start all, the Logs page and Services, Check ports are the two places to look first.