Chris Clarke's Blog

This tutorial will take you through the steps needed to install PHP on Microsoft Windows. I’m using Vista, but with minor changes, these instructions should also be valid for Windows XP and Windows 7 as well. I will cover Linux and Mac OS X in another, future post.

Instead of going through and telling you to download Apache, PHP, phpMyAdmin and MySQL individually, I’m going to instruct you to go and download a software package called WampServer. You will need to download the installer from the WampServer webpage. WAMP stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP meaning the software will install all these at once. This software will install like a normal Windows program, it is safe to just click Next until you reach the end of the installer. The installer will place a shortcut in your Start Menu and on your Desktop called Start WampServer. To start your PHP-enabled web server, all you need to do is double click this icon (in Vista, User Account Control will prompt you, it is safe to click Allow).

To check that your server is working, point your web browser to http://localhost/. If you see a page with server information, your server is working. If you don’t, post in the comments and I will help you troubleshoot.

WampServer will add a new icon to your taskbar’s notification area which you can left click and control the various aspects of your new server.

You can use the various options in this menu to configure your server. You will probably be most interested in the PHP submenu where you can easily enable and disable PHP extensions and features without having to deal with configuration files. The option to make changes to PHP using php.ini is still there if you want it though, and it won’t break the ability of WAMP to automatically make changes using the menu.

If you went with the default configuration in the installer, the folder in which you place your files will be located in the following location:

C:\wamp\www

Files and Folders that you place in this folder will be accessible at the following URL:

http://localhost/

It is important to note that this location will only be available on your computer. You can’t go giving this URL to your friends. It isn’t complicated to allow that to happen (with a different URL specific to your PC), but it is beyond the scope of the article.

Congratulations, by just downloading one installer, you now have a fully functional local development server which you can use as a sandbox to learn PHP.

If there is significant interest in a manual installation and configuration process of the individual programs, I will also post a tutorial of that method. In most cases though, for development purposes on Windows, you won’t need to do this.  I should note that I personally use WAMP to quickly get myself setup with a server for development.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 8:11 PM by Chris Clarke and is filed under PHP, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.