Practicing Drupal on a localhost

webjourneyman - May 10, 2006 - 13:23

I´m moving and will not have internet access for some time. I´ve decided to learn using Drupal to make a website for a birthday present in mid july.
Can I install Apache on my computer, download Drupal and practice offline? Do you know of any info for that purpose? Do I need to install anything else, MySql perhaps?

Thanks in advance.

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Use IIS 5.1 in Windows XP Pro

petergdrupal - May 10, 2006 - 13:58

You can use Microsoft Internet Information Service 5.1 server to host your drupal site on the localhost. IIS 5.1 is not installed on Windows XP Pro by default. Go to Control Panel Add/Remove Components and check IIS to install. You can also download Apache and install it on Windows if you don't have Windows XP Pro because Home Edition doesn't include IIS. I use IIS 5.1 to host my drupal site and it works very well. You can even host your site on the internet on IIS 5.1 if you want to. Also you need MySQL server to create the database for your drupal site. It is also available to download for free.

WAMP solution

JordiTR - May 10, 2006 - 14:10

Hi webjourneyman.

You can download a WAMP solution at http://www.appservnetwork.com and with one installer you'll have Apache, PHP and MySQL. It installs everything at C:\AppServ and at C:\AppServ\www you can add on different directories you're projects that will be locally accessed as http://localhost/directoryname. I recommend you AppServ 2.4.4a for more stable versions. That's the solutions I'm using on three different computers without any difficulty.

Thank you both, that gives

webjourneyman - May 10, 2006 - 14:20

Thank you both, that gives me two solutions to look into. While I´m here, can you recomend a tutorial for an absolute drupal beginner?

video of install on windows

jakeg - May 10, 2006 - 16:15

You may want to watch my video on how to install on windows. Its a speedy 3 minutes, so you may want to pause it as you go:
http://www.jakeg.co.uk/drupal/install_video.htm

Jake
---
School and university yearbooks and Drupal web services, London

Excellent

webjourneyman - May 10, 2006 - 16:18

Thank you

XAMPP!

venkat-rk - May 10, 2006 - 16:59

There is another option and that is the XAMPP package from www.apachefriends.org. The additional advantage is that you can find a few handbook pages on drupal.org for configuring and using XAMPP for drupal on localhost.

Offline reading

Michelle - May 10, 2006 - 18:52

I don't know how up to date these are, but there's PDFs of the handbook:

http://www.puregin.org/Drupal-handbooks

There's also some Drupal books (as in real paper) available to purchase.

Michelle

Thanks

webjourneyman - May 10, 2006 - 18:59

Ramdak, could you give me an url? Are those pages on the apachefriend site or drupal?

Michelle, those will be great help.

I read in a comment in the guestbook that drupal has problems with php5, that comment was since januar 2005. Have those bugs been worked out, anyone know?

Yikes, I thought there were

venkat-rk - May 11, 2006 - 01:03

Yikes, I thought there were many more pages than just this one on XAMPP:
http://drupal.org/node/43545

However, XAMPP is really easy to set up, especially if you use the .exe download. It installs like any other Windows program. Be sure to pay attention to some of its warnings about security issues, and then configure clean urls and you are ready to go. One advantage with XAMPP is that you can use php4 or php5.