Install XAMPP to run Apache, MySQL, and PHP locally on your computer. Download the Windows executable, run the installer, start Apache and MySQL from the Control Panel, then navigate to http://localhost/ to verify it works. Put your PHP files in the htdocs folder.
Welcome to Tutorial 2, Installing XAMPP on Your Computer. Now XAMPP is basically a tool that you can install on any OS, or most of them. I'm pretty sure they have one for Windows, one for Linux, and a few for the other types. But basically what it is, is it makes it so that you can run Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your This is useful for 2 purposes. The first is developing. Say that you have this amazing idea, but you don't want to invest the money into a web server yet. You can create your idea and test it all and— what the heck— and see if it works, if you can get it to be fully functional, and then you can set up or buy your server. But, uh, also it's to test your scripts if you don't want to waste the space on your web server, even though PHP files are incredibly small. But anyhow, it's just you. Okay, so first of all, you will need to download it. Download it for your OS. I recommend the .exe file, or the executable. Okay. And once you're done installing, I installed mine on the C drive, it will open up this and you just choose whatever you want. But once it comes down to the last part, start the XAMPP control panel, I chose yes. And this little panel will pop up. This is where you can run your stuff. And so basically we'll run Apache and we will run MySQL. And from here we have our shell access, setup, port check, explore, CSM or SCM, refresh, help, exit. Explore opens up our file path to the files that we use. And you can like mess around, look around. And htdocs is where we store our stuff that— our scripts that we can run on our computer. Now, a lot of people, before they figure out XAMPP, they tend to just save the files to their computer and they're like, what the heck, it won't run. Well, that's because your computer does not have a PHP compiler built into it. You will need to install one. And personally, I think XAMPP is the best. So now we can— if we go to our localhost, just type http://localhost/ and enter, we can see that we come up here. It redirects us to XAMPP. And actually, before that, you'll get something like this. You choose your language. There we go. Now you can see that we have all this stuff. Of course, you could do— use whatever. You can use 127.0.0.1, but I just like localhost. Now from here we can view our status, just like that. Our security, documentation, components, PHP info. Actually, we should view this. We have PHP version 5.3. It's perfect. Now Let's script. Basically, all we need to do now is open up our HTC Docs, and you could write your PHP script right in here. For instance, that one's right there. I have no idea where it leads to. Let's go. It's just a small redirect thing. But yeah, that's basically how you install XAMPP. That's how you use it. All you need to do is locate your install location and go to htdocs. And from there you can access it by going to your localhost. And, uh, very simple, very easy. Thanks, and I hope to see you again.
