When developing, it is always good to have a local site. Many skip this and use only a staging site and the production site. However, having a local environment will make life easy with testing scripts quickly and easily. Change a file, save, and run. However, using a staging site, you have to FTP up and down, and with WordPress and Windows, this sometimes can get you into trouble if not done correctly.
So, we need to install Apache (the server software), PHP (the language that WordPress runs on), and MySQL (the database). To do this on an Apple machine, use the Make WordPress Tutorial for MAMP or see the older tutorial in the Codex: Installing MAMP. For Windows machines, there is XAMPP, which stands for Apache + MySQL + PHP + Perl.
Quick Summary
Here are the simplified steps on how to install WordPress on your local computer that we will walk through this week:
- Install a local server ( XAMPP).
- Configure PHP
- Launching Apache & Troubleshooting with Skype
- Create a new database via phpMyAdmin.
- Setup XAMPP Security
- Download WordPress from wordpress.org and install into the htdocs folder (typically C:/xampp/htdocs).
- Run the famous 5 minute install and follow the instructions: wp-admin/install.php.
- Done!