My ongoing Journey with setting up bWapp on Kali Linux

Ever since I decided to set up my own PenTest lab, I have been diving into various fields of IT Security. As part of this journey, I decided to set up bWapp on my Kali VM machine. I was expecting a smooth setup but turned out to be a naive approach.
I started by downloading the package and following the "standard" install procedure, which is also well explained here.

However, when it came to the "installing" section, I experienced a totally unexpected error:

Connection failed: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' bwapp

After starting to google it, found the correct solution here, which relied on creating a new database user and granting permissions for it. Of course in the end, ha to edit the settings of the bWapp accordingly as well.

This resolved installing issue but we were barely warming up. I noticed that some of the SQL injection pages were not loading and showing me blank page (and this issue actually still persists). Plus, XML related pages were showing the error:

Call to undefined function simplexml_load_file() in /var/www/html/bWAPP/xmli_2.php:154 Stack trace: #0 {main} thrown in /var/www/html/bWAPP/xmli_2.php

The resolution for that again took longer than I could imagine. After googling it again, found the solution here. Basically, all I had to do was to install php7.0-simplexml. However, another surprise was waiting for me while trying to install it. I got the following error from the apt-get:

The following signatures were invalid kali 

After googling it, it turned out that I had to update the archive-keyring package, as described here.

Having seen that my Kali was actually outdated, decided o update and upgrade my Kali, before trying to install any packages. Therefore, used the following commands, in total which tok 1h 43mins to complete! (downloading and installing)

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Finally, installed simplexml and got the XML injection stuff working! 

Still though, SQL injection issue remains, keep getting blank page for some of the challanges, I have checked the source code of pages which return blank page to figure out which function might be causing this incompatability with PHP 7 but so far no luck. 

Another thing I noticed is, even some of the SQL injection pages which do not return blank page, they queries return HTTP 500 error. Will be updating as I find the cause of the issue.