Keeping Zend Studio’s version of Zend Framework in sync with Zend Server CE (on Windows)

Today I updated my install Zend Server CE.  I have to say that the ease of installing PHP, Apache and MySQL with Zend Server CE is amazing, and then configuring PHP’s extensions and directives with the provided interface is simply a dream!  (Really wish I could afford the full Zend Server, but that’s another matter…)

One thing that irked me, though, was that now my Zend Studio’s version of Zend Framework was different.  That doesn’t seem like a big problem, but I use the include path for my projects and always have ZF on there, which allows me to take advantage of the auto complete and so on.

My first thought was to use a symbolic link to point form the Studio’s folder to the Server CE folder…  But wait, I’m using Windows 7 – surely something as handy as a symbolic link can only be used on Linux machines?  I can understand why you’d think that, but did you know that you can create symlinks on Windows as of Vista?  Oh yes, you read correctly, my friend!  The command to do that is:

mklink /D \Path\To\SymLink \Path\To\Original

So for me, it was a case of doing:

mklink /D "ZendFramework-1" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Zend\ZendServer\share\ZendFramework"

from within my Zend Studio folder, which happened to be:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Zend\Zend Studio - 7.1.1\plugins\org.zend.php.framework.resource_7.2.0.v20100324-1300\resources

I rebuilt my projects and lo-and-behold, a new version of ZF for my projects, and one that’ll always match with what Zend Server CE thinks I’m using. 🙂