Installing Apache Web Server on Windows XP

This article deals with installing Apache Web Server on Windows XP. This guide is easy to follow, for everyone to make use of it and it will help you have your very own personal web server for local web designing and development.

Out of the numerous web servers on the internet, none of them prevail as the open source Apache web server does, the majority of all web servers out there run on Apache. This should make perfect sense to why I chose to use this server, because I want to familiarise you with the most widely used web server.

To get ourselves up and running quickly, we will be using the easy to install distribution known as XAMPP to ease our troubles. I could show you a step by step basis, of installing each component but because this is primarily aimed at beginners but suitable for everyone to use, we needed an easy way to do this. If you are familiar with XAMPP then you may not need this guide, since all I do is outline how to install it and later on if people still have problems, I would like to help them out in this thread, so if you do have problems with my steps and something isn't going right for you then ask in here and I'll try to help you out.

Many people know from their own experience that it is not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and PERL.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and PERL as well as some other programs that provide more features you can take advantage of. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use it - just download, extract and start.

Please Note: XAMPP is configured with all features turned on, From a security point of view, this default configuration is not secure enough for a live production environment. Do not run XAMPP for this type of environment. (Unless you know how to configure it correctly)

What You Will Need

Product	Version	Size	Download
XAMPP Windows [Basic package]	1.5.5	32.9MB	Installer

What You Need to Do

Start off by downloading the XAMPP installer and save it to your Desktop or a location that will be easily accessible to you. We will be using the desktop for this tutorial. For the latest version of XAMPP you should check out the XAMPP for Windows website for a more uptodate version.

Getting Started

I will now run through the installation process with you, I am providing images to illustrate the steps, but remember things may look different for you since not everyone's computer is exactly alike.

Now that we have downloaded the XAMPP installer, we run the program by using the left mouse button and double clicking on the icon for xampp-win32-1.5.5-installer.exe, this will start verifying the file integrity, if the download is corrupted this will let you know and you should re-download the file again. It will then present us with the Installer Language dialog box. I will be using English, if you use another language then see if they have your language there but this tutorial will remain with the English version.



Next up you will be presented with the welcome screen which starts off the Setup Wizard that will guide you through the installation, I'm just trying to give you a sense of what's going on but you can ignore me and follow the Wizard if you're comfortable, but if things go wrong, you can check back or ask here. To save me repeating what it says though, please be sure to read it as XAMPP does make this quite easy to install.



After clicking on Next you are now presented with the install location screen which is the location you'll pick, that you would like XAMPP to be installed at, the default location is C:\Program Files\. Due to my computer configuration, I'll be using E:\Program Files\ which is where I store all my programs, but you should have no problems leaving it as default.



After clicking on next, another screen appears, this time it's the XAMPP Options, the default does not automatically run Apache and MySQL on start up, so we should change it so that it does, unless you are comfortable with starting it manually. If you aren't comfortable, then check Install Apache as service and Install MySQL as service.



After you click install, it starts installing XAMPP by extracting the files to the location you picked for installation. This could take a while depending on your system specifications, so why not make yourself something to eat, or have a cup of your favorite beverage. If you made it this far, then you should celebrate. Just be patient while it is installing. Do not be alarmed if more Windows pop up during this process, this is part of the installation routine for installing PHP.

XAMPP should now be installed and we can leave the Setup Wizard.



The final steps installs the services, to make sure that Apache and all the features are installed correctly and work, during this stage you may see more pop ups, this is to be expected. If running Windows Firewall or any other firewall, you may receive a Windows Security Alert/Warning about it wanting to block Apache, just click on Keep Blocking or Deny, or whatever allows your firewall to stop it allowing access over the Internet.



We should now be notified that the services installed correctly.



We are finally finished, another dialog box appears congratulating us. We are then asked if we would like to start the XAMPP Control Panel, and Yes we do.



The XAMPP Control Panel allows us to control which services we want running, the location we installed XAMPP. The important part is what we have running though. We should have Apache and MySQL running, if you think you need FileZilla (FTP server) or Mercury (Mail Transport Agent, like sendmail) then you can start them through this control panel. You can either exit or left click in the taskbar system tray (near the clock iun the corner) the XAMPP icon to minimise the control panel to the tray.



To test if everything is installed, we now open up our web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc) and type in the address bar http://localhost/ and we should be presented with the XAMPP splash screen, select your language.

Explore around this area, familiarise yourself with everything presented here, your own personal web server is now installed. I wish I could talk more about this area but to not throw you in the deep end yet, I should show you how to test your own pages out first.

Lets test it

I want you to open up notepad, inside I want you to type or copy and paste this:



Save this file as index.php inside C:\Program Files\xampp\htdocs\ and then try http://localhost/ again in your web browser to see if it works. This should be a simple HTML page that has one heading and a paragraph that is created by PHP, this should show PHP is working fine. To get back to the XAMPP page, you will now be required to type http://localhost/xampp/ in your web browser.

The End, Well Done

Now you have your very own web server installed and can begin working on your own web site locally.

Thank you all for reading.

MC

P.S. I needed hosting credits.

great tutorial! you explained everything well and showed all of the steps of the XAMPP setup! the steps that you described are exactly as i remember it from installing XAMPP!

you could also go into some detail about the options of each of the components and how to setup your server once its installed and running! but that could be a different tutorial.

well done
-jimmy

Yeah nice Tut Master.
I have set up Apache, PHP, MySQL, Samba, FTP Servers soo many times as individual servers on my workstation so I know how much time and how much agony it can be getting all these things configured correctly to all work together.
Also I have had to do it cross platform a lot of the time cos my station is windows and linux on a dual boot for about the last 6 years.
I cannot praise enough multi server deployment packages like XAMPP and Lampp for Linux, they really cut down the time and agony!!
IT is very good also if your playing around with a CMS site because everything can be done locally instead of having to take up bandwidth all the time and doing it on the servers here.

Yeah like Jimmy said if you need more credits then make another Tut about the post install config and the Xampp server control app that you can run as a service.

Kl. This is really helpful and will help me alot in creating my site.

Thanks For Your Help and contribution

-Lewis

This post has been edited by mastercomputers: Feb 3 2007, 05:17 AM

I still can't get PhP working on my windows XP home...I don;t have the server applications as they are not included in the home edition.

If someone has an id how to do it please reply ...