Installing WP - Locally

No Comments January 18, 2008

Some of you maybe followed the tutorial from Jeffro2pt0 on weblog-tools-collection, about installing WordPress locally on your workstations at home. He wrote a very nice turorial about using WampServer to install your copy of WP locally. If you are developing themes or write plugins for wordpress it will save you lots time, bandwith and hassle with an installation locally. But it´s also good if you are just starting a new blog or a new project because you’ll be able to preview it and fix any mistakes before it goes online to the community.

Jeffro2pt0 explains very well all steps in this progress, starting from downloading WampServer to finally login into your WPadmin locally.

What i would like to write today is a tutorial how i installed my WordPress locally on windows using XAMPP lite. Both tools give you Apache, MySQL, PHP, SQLitemanager and PHPMyAdmin and install everything you need that turns your PC into a webserver.

Installing XAMPP Lite

  • Download and install XAMPP Lite (I downloaded the EXE (7-zip) version and extracted it to the root of my C drive);
  • Go to the xampplite folder and open setup_xampp.bat (Press any key to continue when it tells you to);
  • Open xampp-control.exe and start Apache and MySql (It’s inside the xampplite folder as well and all you need to do to start these services is press the corresponding ‘Start’ buttons);

The installation process is pretty simple. After accepting the license agreement and specifying where the XAMPP files will be installed to, the installation file will be unpacked, doing all of the heavy work for you. Using applications like this is the easiest way to turn your machine into a webserver

Creating a new Database

  • Open up a Web browser and go to http://localhost/xampp/splash.php (Apache and MySql need to be running. By the way, I used Mozilla Firefox);
  • Click on the language that you want (I assume that English is good since you are reading this);
  • On the left side, under Tools, click on phpMyAdmin (A new page will open);
  • Find where it says Create new database and type in a name for your database in the box (that will house your installation of WordPress, i typed wp in);
  • Select utf8_unicode_ci from the drop down menu (It should be the last one);
  • Click on the ‘Create’ button (You’ve just created a new database);

 

With creating this database you finished the setup of XAMPP and now you have an empty database that the WP installation files can work with. The next step is to download the latest version of WordPress and extract it to a temporary folder.

Installing WordPress

  • In the extracted folder, rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php;
  • Open wp-config.php in a text editor (I used Dreamweaver);
  • Change
    define(’DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
    define(’DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
    define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
    to
    define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wp’); // The name of the database
    define(’DB_USER’, ‘root’); // Your MySQL username
    define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ”); // …and password
    and save
    (If you typed in another name in step 4 of ‘Creating a New Database’, type in that name instead of wordpress)
  • Go to the xampplite folder and open the htdocs folder;
  • Cut and paste the WordPress folder to the htdocs folder;
  • Open up a Web browser and go to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php;
  • You’ve just installed the best bloggin software locally! (Yarr!)

Migrating from Public to Localhost

You’ll have now a fully functioning, fresh install of WordPress that you can do whatever you want with. Migrating an existing WordPress install onto your local computer is not as easy as a fresh install. But WordPress offers you a very neat solution - the Export/Import function in your admin panel.
(mt) makes it easy for me to backup any existing Database, but there are severall plugins for WP out there, that make it easy to backup and download the files of your blog locally.

There are many ways to export your databases and this guide is by no means a cure for all. This was my detailed approach as to how I migrated my public install to a local install. Some of the actions I performed may not have been necessary, nor required, but this is the way I did it and it worked! If you have a correction or a different way of doing things, by all means leave a comment.