If you plan to host your development PHP applications on local windows workstation or windows server, i would recommend you to use XAMPP as your web server. XAMPP is one of the popular and cross-platform package of a Apache HTTP server, MySQL database, PHP interpreter, and Perl interpreter. It’s consist of Apache web server, MySQL, PHP, Perl, a FTP server and phpMyAdmin packages and provides all the components required for developing, running, debugging, and unit testing of PHP applications. It is very easy to install and setup XAMPP in windows workstation or windows server as it’s reliable and fast way to set up environment for PHP programming. You can follow below steps if you are not sure where to start.
1. Visit the official site of Apache friends where all the products are listed. Start download XAMPP 1.8.1
2. Double click the .exe file.
3. Click next to start.
4. Select component you want to install then click next.
5. Please choose folder to locate XAMPP files.
6. Install BitNami for XAMPP. BitNami is to make open source content management system (CMS) easier to install and manage across all platforms.
7. Begin installing XAMPP.
8. Click “Finish” to complete XAMPP installation wizard.
9. On XAMPP control panel, start Apache and MySQL.
10. Visit localhost at you browser to confirm it’s working or not. That’s all.
