FIlipino Freelance Web Designer

When I say locally, it means you will be using your own computer as a host for your website. It works like you are browsing in the Internet but the files you are browsing is in your home computer. Is is also possible to have a server computer installed in your place and use your own computer accessing files from your server. It will always be called local every time the client computer is only accessing files from and intranet server and not from the Internet. So this means, you don’t need to have an Internet connection to have a local wordpress installed in your server.

So, before we start installing and configuring your local web server we should first download the following:

• Xampp – Xampp is an easy to use and easy to install apache web server for windows, Linux, MacOs and Solaris. It comes with mySQL, PHP and Perl.
• Wordpress – I suggest using the latest stable release is the best thing to download. This is really important because this is what we will be installing. lol!

Now that you have downloaded the necessary files needed for you to install wordpress locally, we will now install them.

First, we need to install your newly downloaded Xampp.

For Windows Vista users who wishes to install Xampp I suggest installing it in other partition aside from your Windows partition. Due to Windows Vista User Account Control (UAC), Xampp might not work properly. You can also choose to disable UAC so you can install Xammp on the same partition

You can choose to use your Windows IIS as your web server but you will need to configure it manually to get PHP and Perl running on your server. You should also make sure that there is only one web server running or if you are a more advance user make sure you are not using the same ports for your web servers. There is also an issue with Skype and Apache, read this tutorial to fix this error.

After Installing Xampp, open your browser and type in the address bar http://localhost or simply localhost. You should see this page or else there is a problem in your installation or your Xampp Apache Server is not yet running.

Now that Xampp is running in our computer, we can now proceed on installing your Wordpress files in our newly created local web server. Before proceeding, we should create first our database for the wordpress installation. In your browser, type http://localhost/phpmyadmin. and you will see this page.

Under the create new database, type the new database name that you wish to create and click create.

After succesfully creating a database for our wordpress installation, we can now continue to install the wordpress files on our webserver. Just unzip the wordpress files that you have just downloaded  to C:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress (i choose wordpress as the folder name so its up to you what name you want to give your wordpress installation folder). Once finish extracting the files, open your browser again and type http://localhost/wordpress. Now you can see this one.

There are 2 ways on how to create a configuration file for our wordpress installation but I will only tackle the easier one because it’s only for local installation. This also works for most online installation but due to security issues this is only preferred to be used for offline or local installation. On the same page, click “create a wp-config.php file through a web interface” it will bring you to this page.

Just click “let’s go!” and will bring you to the configuration page.

Enter the following info:

Database Name: <the name of the database you created in phpmyadmin>

Username: <the default mysql username for xampp installation is root>

Password: <the default mysql password is blank so don’t input anything here and leave it blank>

Database Host: <You can skip this one because you are also using localhost as your database host>

Table Prefix: <Just skip this one, leave is as ease.>

Click Submit and you will be redirected to this page.

Click run the install and you will be redirected to a page where you will input the name of your blog and the email address to use.

After entering your Blog title and email address, click Install WordPress. After successfully installing wordpress you will be landing on this page where you can see your admin account username and password. Please make sure to change your password after logging in because the password that was initially given to you is a random password and auto-generated.

Now open another browser or open another tab and enter http://localhost/wordpress and you will see your newly local installed Wordpress Blog.

That’s it you now have your own locally installed wordpress blog. Watch out for my next tutorial and I will be discussing how to create a wordpress theme for your blog.