Getting XAMPP to work with Dropbox

Question

I have Dropbox and xampp (well, lampp) install on my xubuntu machine. I keep all of the sites I (offline) manage in my Dropbox folder. I have a question on getting it synced with xampp htdocs directory while doing all of the editing in Dropbox.

Say, for example, I have a website called Rob's Rides and the html/images/php/database files reside in /home/user/dropbox/robsrides ... I would also have a "shortcut" directory in /opt/lampp/htdocs/shortcutrobsrides so when I edit code in my dropbox, it will also change in the htdocs folder. The database could also do the same "shortcut method" - The end result would allow me to type in localhost/shortcutrobsrides and see the latest content.

Would this method work? How would I go about creating these shortcuts?

If you're wondering... I'm doing this "the hard way" because I use different computers throughout the day and rely on Dropbox to host my data. I understand for each computer I'd use, a new shortcut folder would have to be created in order to work with xampp, that is perfectly fine.

Answer 1

The most 'natural' way to do this that i see is using symlinks - something like ln -s /path/to/original/ /path/to/linkName would create a symlink, and any changes to one location would be reflected in the other.