Once you’ve experienced speed and reliability, there’s no going back. Remember the era before high-speed internet, when you had to wait for videos to buffer? Awful times. Three cheers for the modern internet speeds!
If you’re used to developing your sites on a live server, that’s exactly what shifting to a local development environment such as XAMPP would feel like. Blazing fast development and exceptional reliability. You can never go back to the old ways.
In this post, I’ll be showing you how to install XAMPP on your Windows PC and have a WordPress site (including Multisite) running on it in just a few minutes. I’ll also cover some common issues that you may encounter and how to overcome them.
Let’s get going.
If you prefer a video instead, we’ve got you covered!
What is XAMPP?
In a nutshell, XAMPP is a local server that you can install on your laptop/desktop to mimic an actual web server.
It’s a completely free, open source Apache server distribution with MariaDB (formerly MySQL), PHP, and Perl. XAMPP is available for all major operating systems, and is extremely easy to install and use. This explains why it’s the most popular PHP development environment.
Here’s what the alphabets in XAMPP stand for:
- X — cross-platform (X), as it supports multiple operating systems
- A — Apache HTTP Server
- M — MariaDB (formerly MySQL)
- P — PHP
- P — PERL
Apart from the core components mentioned above, XAMPP usually comes with other useful tools such as Mercury mail server, phpMyAdmin for database administration, Webalizer for web server log analysis, OpenSSL, Apache Tomcat for running Java code, and FileZilla FTP server.
Why XAMPP?
As a professional WordPress developer, I cannot stress enough how beneficial having a local development environment is. It lets me setup new WordPress installs in a jiffy. And since it’s hosted locally on my computer, there’s no delay in uploading my changes and see them come alive on the browser.
Want to try a new theme? Just copy and paste it into your wp-content/themes directory. And bam! It’s loaded instantly. The same with plugins and changing any settings. No server delay, no upload hassles, no unnecessary waiting times. Everything happens in real time.
It’s like taking your car on a racetrack and pushing it to its limits. The perfect testing environment to go wild without any repercussions (well, almost).
With XAMPP installed on my PC, I can continue working on my site even if I’m at a remote location with no connectivity. Developing locally is also much secure, as your site is offline and away
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This article was written by Salman Ravoof and originally published on WPMU DEV Blog.