XAMPP is one of many AMP software stacks (Apache – MySQL – PHP) that can be used to create a local web development environment for design and testing. It automatically installs and configures Apache as a web server so that you can view your pages through http://localhost, MySQL as a database server for website data and PHP to render any PHP code within your pages.
Once you have XAMPP installed, you can install WordPress or other content management systems locally so that you can easily develop and test your web content and programming before uploading it to the web or an intranet. I also use WordPress as a local CMS for organizing my own content.
Setting up XAMPP and WordPress takes as little as 10 minutes and can be done either on your hard drive or a USB flash drive as I show in this video. The flash drive option is a little slower but it is easily portable between systems as XAMPP runs entirely from the directory it’s installed to.
Downloads: XAMPP is developed by ApacheFriends and maintained by Bitnami. The download is available through SourceForge or from ApacheFriends.org: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/ https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html
The latest version of WordPress is available from WordPress.org. https://wordpress.org/download/