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Faking Symlinks on Windows 2003

Posted on 09/17/2009 at 04:25 pm by Kevin Wentworth
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My production server is a LAMP server.  I love it.  I have one cental location for my CakePHP application and symlink the folders I need to each individual hosting account.  It's pretty easy to do and very powerful.  I work on another server that is Windows 2003.  Everytime I sit down to do work, I bemoan not having the ability to create symlinks.  Turns out there is a way...

Junction Links are essentially Symlinks in Windows

Sweet! I don't care what a symlink is called on Windows, but it's called a Junction Link and I want one.  There's no built in GUI support for junction links, but I found this great program. 

Here's the steps I took to make a symlink on Windows 2003:

1. Download and Install Junction Link Magic
2. You will need to have an empty folder that will mirror the contents of the source folder
3. Open the application...
4. Junction Link is the empty folder (the folder that will be filled with source files)
5. Destination is the source folder (where the files actually reside)
6. This confused me the first time, but remember target is on the left (top), source is on the right (bottom) of the wizard/interface.

I'll give the disclaimer that they give- for advanced users only.  I guess you can really screw things up, which is why this functionality is basically undocumented by Microsoft.

I hope this helps someone work easier with Windows 2003 and symlinks, err... junction points.

Cheers,

-Kevin Wentworth