Setting Up a Local Environment via XAMPP: Launching Apache & MySQL

Next we will launch Apache & MySQL. To do this easily, open the Control Panel.

Click Start on both Apache and MySQL.

Now, if you want, you can install Apache and your local webserver to another port like 8080. To change the port, you want to navigate to your XAMPP directory (e.g., C:/xampp/apache/conf) and open the file httpd.conf in your text editor. On line 45, you'll find:

To change it to port 8080, simply make this change:

Then later, on line 176, you'll see:

ServerName localhost:80

Change it to:

ServerName localhost:8080

If you switch to port 8080, you'll need to to always go to it via localhost:8080. Furthermore, WordPress will not allow you to enable multisite locally with a port number trailing localhost. It will redirect you to http://localhost/xampp/ or http://localhost:8080/xampp/.

You're host directory will be C:/xampp/htdocs based on httpd.conf. If you wish to change it, simply find it in httpd.conf on line 183 and make whatever changes you'd like.