Nothing that I’ve spotted. Remember, though, these are fresh default installs of all of the above. To rule out Win 8.1 64bit Update 1, I’m now doing a clean VM install on Windows 7 SP1 32bit to test the exact scenario above and report back. The only remaining differential is you tested on win 7 and I’m on win 8. I can’t imagine that would be the issue, but we’ll see.
At this point I’ve ostensibly ruled out XAMPP/WAMP since the same issue occurs on a manually configured apache/php stack with the latest releases. Additionally, as I noted, css_pipeline is set to false on the github release, which is why it worked for me earlier today. It’s set to true on the .zip release on getgrav.org. So, the only remaining difference is Win 8 vs. Win 7.
Aha! Made a little progress although it’s still a bit strange. I just checked my XAMPP install, and CSS pipeline was off. This is pretty weird because I had not touched anything and had just downloaded the ZIP archive from getgrav.org website with IE. However, i downloaded the same file also from my Mac, and CSS pipeline was on. Very strange.
The thing is when we initially released 0.9.1 we realized we had left CSS pipeline on, and it really should only be used for production, so we re-released with it off. I think that perhaps the GitHub servers didn’t update the ZIP on all of their servers in their farm. So some downloads have the original ZIP with the setting on, and some have the updated ZIP with it off.
Anyway, that aside, i then turned on CSS pipeline in my XAMPP and low and behold apache crashed. So that is undoubtedly the same behavior that you are seeing.
It works fine on Mac and also on LInux, so just seems to be something in the pipeline process that is effecting Windows machines. The CSS pipeline caches all the CSS and combines and mi nifies it, so really it makes no sense in development anyway. At least now i can reproduce it and will be able to try and track it down. Thanks again!
That’s why it’s called beta, right? 
For now, I’d update the getgrav.org .zip immediately before you lose more potential users.
That’s the weird thing, we have updated the ZIP already, and sometimes its the old zip and sometimes the new zip. I think we will have a 0.9.2 release shortly soon anyway and that will definitely have the pipeline off, but maybe we can even get this pipeline issue on windows resolved before then.
It sure makes me feel better to know it’s not just my system. This was going to drive me crazy. Now, time to finally go read the grav manual and play with this thing.
I looked into this a bit further. It’s not the pipelining or even the css-rewrite, but it’s specifically the CSS Minify. So when Pipelining is true and CSS minify is true it breaks in windows, but setting CSS minify to false while CSS pipeline is true is fine. Problem now is this is a 3rd party library with no windows issues reported. I’ll look at it more tomorrow, but I might just put a safety check on to skip minifying on windows until we have a proper solution.
Can you tell me pipeline+minify works If you put this at the bottom of your httpd.conf file and restart apache:
ThreadStackSize 8388608
Working for me…
Also worked in EasyPHP. I will investigate further why on Windows ThreadStackSize is lower than other platforms by default and what specifically is requiring this (I know its minify related to regex)
This is a very old bug on Windows Apache… I hate this, I found a solution for dev enviroment on Windows, disable minify
BTW we have a fix in the develop branch on GitHub that basically skips the minify on windows platforms to get around this problem with ThreadStackSize. You can set assets.css_minify_windows to true to force minify on windows servers if you have updated apache’s httpd.conf with the proper information per: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=47689
Broken by default sortof turned me off, I’m afraid. I do wish you the best of luck with your project, though.
Grav wasn’t broken at all actually. It’s a well known issue with Apache on Windows:
We have a workaround in for the next release, but this is not something we can fix directly as the only fix is to increase the ThreadStackSize in the Apache configuration as I have explained. Even the PHP developers have said this:
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=47689
Just want to make that absolutely clear We do appreciate you helping us to identify this issue though, and wish you the best of luck with your endeavors, no matter what platform you end up using.
Also our workaround for this issue is now available in 0.9.2 release.