How to Create a Local WordPress Site Using XAMPP

 

Installing WordPress on your computer can be a great step towards building a testing environment for your WordPress themes and plugins. WordPress can be installed both on Mac and Windows and upon successful installation, it runs just like the live site. The beauty of installing WordPress on your localhost is that you can carry out a variety of tests without worrying that things will go wrong. I will be illustrating how to install WordPress on one of the most common desktop servers – Xampp. For you to follow this tutorial you need to download and install Xampp.

Why Create a Local WordPress Site?

Creating local WordPress sites is a common practice among developers and site owners. It allows you to test WordPress without creating an actual website on the internet.

Local websites are only visible to you on your computer. You can try different WordPress themes and plugins, test their features, and learn the WordPress basics.

If you already have a WordPress website, then you can create a local copy of your website on your computer to try out new plugin updates before implementing them on your live website.

Important: Local website will only be visible to you on your computer. If you want to make a live website, then you’ll need a domain name and WordPress hosting.

Follow the step by step instructions in our how to start a WordPress blog guide when you are ready to create a live website.

Having said that, let’s check out how to install WordPress locally on Windows, Mac, or Linux using XAMPP.

What is XAMPP?

XAMPP is a software package that includes all things you need to set up a local server environment on your computer.

In order to create a local WordPress site, you need to set up a web server software (Apache), PHP, and MySQL on your computer.

PHP is a programming language and MySQL is a database management software. Both of them are required to run WordPress.

Installing each of them separately is quite difficult for beginners. This is where XAMPP comes in.

XAMPP makes it easy for you to build WordPress websites locally. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux based computers.

Let’s get started by installing XAMPP and setting it up to run your local WordPress site.

Installing WordPress on Localhost Xampp

Before we get started with WordPress installation, you need to have Xampp running on your computer. You can download Xampp from here, installation of Xampp is easy since should click on the .exe file and allow it to run.

You should follow the installation prompts like the installation procedure of any other software or.exe files. It is also important to note that Xampp utilizes the same port 80 and 443 as Skype and at times there is a conflict between the two.

You can solve this conflict by editing the Skype ports or editing Xampp settings to use different ports instead of ports 80 and 443. When you create the new ports for Xampp your localhost address will have to change to include the ports.

For example: if you have the new port as 80, your localhost address will be;

 

http://localhost:80 or http://127.0.0.1:80

If you want to run the Xampp server without editing the ports on Skype or Xampp you can run one at a time. This means you can switch off Skype to run the Apache server. Detailed Installation of Xampp is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Step 1: Download and install XAMPP on your computer

The first step on your way to install WordPress locally is to download and install the XAMPP software. You can download the Windows installer file from Apache Friends. It’s a big file, about 110 MB, so it might take a minute or so depending on your connection:

Once the download finishes, run the file you downloaded to launch the XAMPP installer. If you’re running antivirus software, you might get a warning like this:

Just click Yes to continue. Depending on your Windows configuration, you might also get a prompt about User Account Control (UAC). Just continue through that prompt as well. Once you get through all of the prompts, you should see the standard installer screen:

Just click Next to continue.

On the next screen, you can choose which components to install. To install XAMPP and WordPress, you do not need all of the components. In addition to the required components, all you need are:

• MySQL
• PHPMyAdmin

Again, this is all that’s needed to install WordPress locally. Uncheck everything else and click Next. 

You can now select which folder to install XAMPP in. I always leave it as the default:

On the next screen, you’ll get a prompt asking you to install Bitnami for XAMPP. You do not need this to install XAMPP and WordPress, so just uncheck the box:

Once you click Next, you’re ready to run the install:

The install process might take a few minutes:

Once it finishes, you can launch the control panel to start working with XAMPP:

Step 2: Start the modules and test your server

To install XAMPP and WordPress properly, you’ll need to run two modules:

• Apache
• MySQL

You can start both modules from the XAMPP control panel:

Once you launch them, you should see their status turn to green:

And now you should be able to test that your local server is working by going to http://localhost/ in your web browser of choice:

If all went well, you now have a functioning XAMPP server on your Windows PC! But now it’s time to install XAMPP and WordPress. So here’s how to get a WordPress site up and running on XAMPP.

Step 3: Add the WordPress files

If you’ve ever manually installed WordPress, the rest of the process should feel pretty familiar. First, you need to go to wordpress.org and download the latest version of WordPress.

Then, in Windows, navigate to the folder where you installed XAMPP. For me, that’s C://xampp. It should be something similar for you. Then, in that folder, find the htdocs subfolder:

In htdocs, create a new folder for your test site. This folder name will become the sub-name used to access your site. For example, if you make the folder testsite, you’ll access your site by going to http://localhost/testsite.

Once you create the folder, extract the WordPress .zip file you downloaded from wordpress.org into it:

Step 4: Create a database for WordPress

Next, you need to create a MySQL database for your WordPress install. To do that, launch PHPMyAdmin from your XAMPP control panel:

Then click on Databases at the top:

And enter a name for your database and click Create. Your name can be anything – just remember it because you’ll need it for the next step:

Unlike installing WordPress on a live web server, when you install XAMPP and WordPress, you don’t need to worry about creating a database user.

Step 5: Install WordPress locally via the on-screen installer

When you visit your test site, you should see the normal WordPress installer. Remember, your test site is just http://localhost/FOLDERNAME:

The only step where this process will differ from a normal install is the database details. When you get to the database details, enter them like this:

• Database Name = Name of the database you created in PHPMyAdmin
• Username = “root”
• Password = leave blank

Then finish the rest of the WordPress install process like normal.

Once you complete the process, you should see your brand new WordPress install running perfectly on your local host:

As you can see above we have successfully installed WordPress and login and everything works well. If we navigate to our htdocs folder then to the site’s folder – demo we can open and see the wp-config.php file.

Conclusion

We have successfully, installed WordPress on the localhost Xampp server

In the next tutorial, I will be installing WordPress on Wamp Server another popular desktop server. I hope this tutorial has guided you and enlightened you on how to install WordPress on localhost. If you have any questions, comments, compliments, or further inquiries please get in touch using the comments section below.