XAMPP for Windows – Fast and Easy
Looking for a quick and relatively painless way to set up Apache, MySQL, and PHP (as well as additional mods like Perl) on your windows XP box? If you’re stuck running Windows XP Home, resentful that only XP Pro offers Internet Information Server, or IIS, then XAMPP may be just what you’re looking for. XAMPP offers a nice solution that will have you running a webserver/database combo capable of serving up dynamic PHP content in just a few minutes.
Download XAMPP
To get started, head over to the Apache Friends XAMPP for Windows site:
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html
Select the XAMPP link under the Download section, and click the link under XAMPP for Windows 1.7.3, (Basic) to download the 100 MB .zip file to your computer. This link will begin downloading the file from SourceForge.net at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/files/XAMPP%20Windows/xampp-win32-1.7.3.zip/download
Download XAMPP from SourceForge.net
Note: If you have any problems with the automatic download, you can click the direct download link listed on the page.
Installation Step 1 – Extract to Hard Drive
Create a new directory on your hard drive, and extract the contents of the downloaded xampp zip file (xampp-win32-1.7.3.zip) to this new directory.
Installation Step 2 – Run Setup Script
Navigate to your new directory, find and execute (double-click) the setup script – named setup_xampp.bat.
Answer prompts – I chose the default values of y,y,n.
Running XAMPP Setup Script
XAMPP Control Panel
Locate and double-click the file xampp-control.exe to open the contrl panel, which provides a graphical interface to start/stop the Apache, MySQL and other services along with links to help and related utilities.
The XAMPP Control Panel
Uninstalling XAMPP
To remove XAMPP from your system, you can manually delete your xampp files, or locate and execute uninstall_xampp.bat to automatically delete the files, desktop shortcuts, etc.
Note: I had a problem when I ran the uninstall batch file on one computer in which I wasn’t initially able to delete my main ‘xampp’ folder and a few files that were left in it. After restarting my computer, I was able to delete the content successfully.
