This article covers how to download, install, and start your very own XAMPP web server on your computer.
XAMPP is a great solution for testing out new designs for websites, playing with new or unfamiliar website software or just temporarily hosting a site on your local computer.
It’s incredibly easy to install and I’m going to run through the easiest way to do so with the Windows installer package.
This article is for beginners, so those of you who’ve played with XAMPP before can probably skip it.
Downloading XAMPP
The best place to get XAMPP is from the official XAMPP project website. This is a guide for the Windows installer package, so we’ll just go right ahead and scroll to the the XAMPP for Windows section.
We’re after the installer package version of XAMPP for Windows as shown in the below picture:
This package is around 35MB, so it may take a little while to download if your internet connection is slow.
Installing XAMPP
Once you’ve downloaded the windows installer, run it.
Press next once you’re ready to proceed with the installation.
The next screen shows where you will install XAMPP. I recommend just leaving it as the default of c:\xammp. This way you won’t have any confusion about where to place your website files in upcoming tutorials.
Click on next to advance to the next screen.
At this stage, we’ll just go with the default options here instead of installing Apache and MySQL as a service, you want to just leave those unchecked.
By installing it as a service it allows you to configure your web service to start every time you boot up your computer. This isn’t something that is desirable for us as we’re going to be using it as a testing platform. For security reasons you don’t really want to have this running all the time.
Press install and wait for the installation to finish.
Press finish when you’re ready and XAMPP will ask you if you want to start the XAMPP control panel now.
Running XAMPP
Press yes, we’re going to discover how easy it really is to start and stop your web server on the fly.
The XAMPP control panel is a handy little dashboard which lets you control when your web server and accompanying database are started and stopped.
Click on the start buttons for the Apache and MySQL services (these will probably be your most frequently used services).
That’s it! Now open your web browser and goto the address http://localhost/xampp. You should see something similar displayed.
Conclusion
Using XAMPP is a great way to take away some of the complexities that sometimes come with running a web server on your own computer. Never before has it been this easy to start and stop your very own server on the fly.
We’ll be testing out how to install various applications here on Code My Own Road in the future using XAMPP as our test platform. If you have any requests, let me know and I can always do a tutorial.
I’m currently planning on two installation guides for both WordPress and Joomla!. If you’re interested in either of these – or just want more entrepreneurial tips and technical tutorials – sign up for the Code My Own Road RSS feed!
[...] Installing XAMPP is dead easy on the Windows distribution as it comes with a Windows installer. [...]