Run Web Server on Your Computer Using XAMPP

More than 50 percent of web server programs being use today are Apache Web Server. One of the main reasons is because it is free! It is widely known that installing manually an apache web server is not an easy task. And it might get harder if we want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl. I believe most of us who are web savvy user know the importance of all these features to run a website. Ok. Leave that behind. Just google it and find the meaning of all these terms. Let see how it goes now.

Actually there is an easy way to install all these using one single Apache distribution which called XAMPP. Very easy to use, just download, install or extract and start. Just some minor settings required for different distributions and different operating systems.

Currently there are four XAMPP distributions:

• XAMPP for Windows

• XAMPP for Linux

• XAMPP for Mac OS X

• XAMPP for Solaris

Advantage of using XAMPP:

• We can run many websites locally on our computer without any cost because the XAMPP itself is free!

• We can do tests, troubleshooting, demo or almost anything without the worries of our real website being touch.

• After successful testing, troubleshoot and so on, we can proceed to install or move it to the real server.

• There are many other advantages you will find after using it

OK. So how do we install XAMPP?

In this simple tutorial we will cover the installation of XAMPP for Windows.

Follow these steps:

• Simply download XAMPP for Windows basic EXE package or XAMPP Lite EXE package for Windows. Depends on what you need. Read the package content first. (Also see the windows compatibility)

• Double click the downloaded EXE package and choose a directory where you want it to be installed. Automatically it will extract the files and setup script will start as well.
  
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• Finally you can start the “XAMPP Control Panel”. With the Control Panel you can start/stop the servers, or install them as Windows services (checkbox the “Svc”).
  

  

• To see whether it works or not, after starting of Apache (and MySQL), go to the address http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/ in your browser and examine all of the XAMPP examples and tools.

• The main directory for all WWW documents is \xampp\htdocs. If you put a file “testing.html” in this directory, you can access it with the URI “http://localhost/testing.html”. If you can see the testing.html page, mean it works!
  

  

Easy isn’t it? Try it out. If got any issues, we will discuss and find the solution together. Keep reading and enjoy!