How to Install a Local Web Server on Windows XP

Hi everyone. Installing a local web server is a very important matter that web developers need to know. Well when you are working on a script you can afford to edit a file each time, upload it to a web server and test if it works. This seems very time consuming. Instead, the better option is why not install a local web server and test the scripts locally. NO you dont actually need a high end server configutration PC to install and run a local web server.

A lot of aspiring new web developers dont know this. So, I thought to write a tutorial on how to install a local web server on Windows XP. So today in this tutorial we are going to see how to install a Local Web Server and run files on it. To be accurate we are going to install an Apache Web server with PHP 4 or 5 and MySQL and test how it works on Windows XP

Local Web Servers on Windows XP. Which Package to choose ?

There are two ways to install there. One is the manual install which is harder one and the other is the automated install which is a lot easier. The concept behind the manual install is we have to manually download Apache, PHP and MySQL and install it on our computer. Any single mistake let the server not runniing properly. So to avoid these we can use the automated one which is a single Windows Binary package loaded with all prerequisites and addons that you might need to ru the server right from Apache to FileZilla and a Mail Server.

There are a lot of such sever automated installation utilities or perhaps applications available like XAMPP. WampServer and NetServer etc. We are using NetServer in this tutorial and recommend you the same though it is a bit outdated but is the easiest one to use at the start.

Installing a Local Web Server on Windows XP

Now Coming to the tutorial, so the first step will be to download the package from the website

Click Here to download Netserver.

Now Open the downloaded file by double clicking it

Select the Extract Directory or Installation Path by clicking [...] button

In out case we chose C:\Local Server

Now after extraction..

Open the NetServer.exe file inside the installation directory

Click on Manage Servers

Click on Install button inside the Apache Web Server Box

Click on PHP5 option and then click on Install button

Now Click on Install button inside the MySQL Server Box

You may get a message like this.. Note that the username for PHPMyAdmin is root and there is no password. Which you can change later via PHPMyAdmin..

Now click on Start both inside the Web/HTTP Server (Apache) box and MySQL Database Server Box

Apache with PHP5 and MySQL is now installed and local web server is now running and can be accessible from http://localhost/

Now the WWW directory inside the extraction directory (in our case C:\Local Server\WWW\) acts as the public_html or the server directory.

Means that any file you place inside the WWW directory can be executed from http://localhost/

For example we placed hello.php inside the WWW directory and the local path to hello.php file is C:\Local Server\WWW\hello.php

The same file can be executed on and can be previewed at http://localhost/hello.php

PHPMyAdmin can be accessed from http://localhost/phpmyadmin

To run, write http://localhost/phpmyadmin in the URL box and press Enter

Now enter the the username as root and leave the password field blank and Click OK

That’s all and there’s your local web server up and running on Windows XP.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial, please comment on how we did it..

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