Portable XAMPP Lite Without Fluff?

There is no "portable" XAMPP, it's portable from the start. Try Apache Friends' forums.
----
R McCue
Cube Games | Cube Games Portables
People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were
the kind of people who didn't need people

UniformServer -- smaller than XAMPP, check it out (already "portable" also).

http://www.uniformserver.com/

Check out my comment in this ActiveCollab blog entry. Fourth one down. I give a tip on how to save even more space by picking the correct file to download along with 3 more files to UPX compress to save more space.

http://www.activecollab.com/blog/23/activecollab-on-your-computer-or-usb...

(Above link may say "revisited", but it links to the blog entry correctly).

Compress everything you can with UPX. My XAMPPLite is only 63mb big (I don't know how big it is to begin with). Open a command prompt and navigate to the xampplite directory.

This first command is optional, it allows you to first decompress already UPX-compressed files. Then we can recompress those to possibly get better compression ratios.

for /r in (*) do c:\path\to\upx\upx.exe -d "%x"

The for command with the /r switch will execute that command on every file (/r recurses through all directories). UPX will error on files that aren't compressed, but don't worry. It will take a short time but let it go.

This is the magic command to compress as much as possible

for /r in (*) do c:\path\to\upx\upx.exe --best "%x"

You'll get plenty of errors from files that can't be compressed. Again, you can safely ignore these.

If you REALLY want to get everything packed in nice and tight, there's a UPX switch to try every possible compression algorithm that UPX knows in an attempt to get everything even smaller:

for /r in (*) do c:\path\to\upx\upx.exe --brute "%x"

You'd use this INSTEAD of --best. Note that this will take about 40 TIMES longer than --best, and usually isn't worth the time imo. You can let it run overnight or something if you want.

Of course you don't have to save these commands just for xampplite, hell, run them from the root of your portable drive if you want... just keep in mind some programs don't work right when compressed (like mIRC, which has a check on it's filename which fails when it's compressed) so if you have problems you can use the -d switch on UPX to try decompressing that program, or the -t to test a compressed app, or just re-copy a decompressed EXE or DLL. Also you don't need to decompress or compress upx.exe itself... it's already distributed --brute'd.

As for my Portable XAMPPLite experience, I find that MOST of it works well on relative pathnames (sorta, I use full pathnames sans the drive letter but including the first \, so I don't have to figure out which program has which working directory) except MySQL, which refuses to work unless I give drive letters in the paths. So it's not truly portable since you have to edit a config whenever the drive letter changes...