A full Tutorial on Installation of WordPress on XAMPP

This tutorial titled “A full Tutorial on Installation of WordPress on XAMPP” is for those who would like to give a try at home by themselves. Setting up a local system with WordPress, will create good learning and developing environment for beginners.

In this tutorial, we cover

1. Installation of XAMPP
2. Creating Database
3. WordPress Installation

To begin with this tutorial you’ll be needing following things to be downloaded to your machine.

1. Download XAMPP from Apache Friends Website
2. Download WordPress from WordPress.org

What is XAMPP?

Before installing XAMPP, you should know what actually XAMPP is. XAMPP stand for cross-platform, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl. It’s a simple and lightweight solution that allows you to create a local web server for testing purposes.

Since XAMPP is cross-platform, it also works on Mac and Linux, but today we’re going to look at setting up XAMPP on Windows 8.

WordPress isn’t a stand-alone application and needs server software to run. XAMPP provides the necessary environment needed to run WordPress on a local machine.

Installation of XAMPP

Now that you have already downloaded XAMPP for Apache Friends Website, you can begin installing XAMPP on your PC.

Double click downloaded xampp-win32-?.?.?-installer.exe to launch the installer.

You may receive warnings about installing the software on your computer. As you would when installing any software on Windows, use your best judgment.

The XAMPP setup wizard will guide you through the installation

Choose the installation folder location, if default is C:/xampp, leave it as default, or you can also change it to other location

In the next window you’ll be asked to select the components of the software you would like to install and which one you don’t want. Since we want to run WordPress on this localhost, just leave Apache and MySQL checked and uncheck the remaining options.

After going through all those options, installation of XAMPP is completed. Click on Finish. If you are asked to run XAMPP – control panel, click Run or Yes.

If you receive any security/firewall warnings during the installation process (such as the one below), make sure you check “Private networks, such as my home or work network” and click “Allow access.” This is very important. If you don’t allow access, XAMPP won’t work.

If you selected to run XAMPP on Finish, the XAMPP – Control Panel will start automatically.

If not, go to the XAMPP folder on your computer and open “XAMPP Control Panel”.

Now that XAMPP Control panel has started, Startup both Apache and MySQL. If you have installed XAMPP properly, both components should run fine without any errors, however, if there are any other applications on your computer using the same ports as these modules then you need to quit the conflicting applications using the same ports and restart XAMPP.

You can check if your new local server is installed by visiting http://localhost in your browser.

Setting up MySQL Database

Now that you have installed and started XAMPP on your local PC, it’s time to setup MySQL database, for this you’ll have start MySQL and PHP services form XAMPP Control Panel.

After starting those services, switch to your web browser and navigate to, http://localhost/phpmyadmin

Click on “Databases” near the top-left and you’ll be prompted to create a new database. I’ve called mine “wordpress_db”, and collation as “utf8_unicode_ci”. When you’ve entered a name, click “Create” and close the window.

You’ll see database creation success message like this

Now, you’ll have to add a user to the database, for that click on the privileges section in the page. And on same page click on “Open new phpMyAdmin window”.

On the page as shown below, click on “Add a new user”.

Now, a form page will open up, fill the form with your instances. For this tutorial, I entered

Username: WordPress

Host: Localhost

For password, you can generate automatic password there or drag and drop to “Use Text Field” and enter your preference password. Both way, you’ll need to remember passwords.

After that, click on “Check All” for setting up privileges, and to finish click on “Go”.

On the next page, under “Database Specific Privilege” drag down the list and select “wordpress_db”.

Again on the next page, under “Database Specific Privilege” click on “Check All” to check all privileges. And click “Go”.

 

Installing WordPress on LocalServer

To this point you have set upped XAMPP and also created MySQL database with a user and global privileges. Now, it’s time to install WordPress on your Local Server.

For this you must have to download WordPress from WordPress.org.

In order to get WordPress working with XAMPP we need to unzip WordPress to the right folder. Go to the XAMPP folder on your computer and open the htdocs folder, i.e. C:/XAMPP/htdocs.

Open your WordPress folder, find the wp-config-sample.php file. Open the file and scroll down until these lines of code define the login details for your database. Replace “database_name_here” with the name of your database, which in my case is “wordpress_db.”

Replace “username_here” with “wordpress” and on “password_here” fill the password of wordpress user you created.

Save the file as “wp-config.php” and close it.

Now we can get on with installing WordPress.

Open your browser and go to http://localhost/wordpress/

You should see the welcome screen for the famous five minute WordPress installation process.

Enter your details and click “Install WordPress.”

Your WordPress installation is now complete, you can now access your local WordPress site by navigating to http://localhost/wordpress/.

If you are having some problem going through this tutorial, you can leave comment below.