Configuring XAMPP on Windows

XAMPP for Windows makes setting up a local test server on your computer relatively easy. It provides the (W)AMP stack - Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It also includes PHPMyAdmin which is very useful for dealing with your MySQL databases.

The following instructions describe XAMPP configuration in some detail. A quickstart guide for installing Drupal and XAMPP on Windows is also available.

(NOTE: XAMPP is only intended for use as a local test server which is available on your own computer. It has been created for ease-of-use, but not for production level security. If you want to tinker with security here is a guide about making XAMPP secure.)

Creating virtual hosts

If you do not want to keep your files in the xampp/htdocs directory and type in a long URL for every page load, you can create virtual hosts for each of your sites instead. For example, you may like to keep all your sites in your My Documents folder for easy backup. Or you could create a root directory on your hard drive such as C:/sites/example/ which will make using shell commands easier. Wherever you choose to store your sites, you can always easily move them at a later date.

With XAMPP you set up virtual hosts in the following file:

/xampp/apache/conf/extra/httpd-vhost.conf

Open up that document in your text editor and append the following information to the bottom:

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
  DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs/"
  ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>

The above only needs to be added once and you don't need to change any details to the above.

The next step, however, needs to be carried out for each site. Copy the code below and add it to the bottom of the file.

<VirtualHost example.local>
  DocumentRoot "C:/path/to/your/site"
  ServerName example.local

  CustomLog "C:/path/to/your/site/logs/example.local.access.log" combined
  ErrorLog "C:/path/to/your/site/logs/example.local.error.log"

  <Directory "C:/path/to/your/site">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

You will need to make some alterations to your personal setup. Check that you have used only forward slashes.

Where it says example.local put the URL you would like to type into your browser to find your site. You can call this what you like, but make sure it relates to the site you are creating and is not a real URL that you may like to access on the Internet otherwise you will get a namespace clash. Using the production site's URL but replacing .com or whatever with .local works well.

Where it says "C:/path/to/your/site" add the directory where your site is going to be stored on your local drive. Note that you should NOT include a slash on the end of the path. You can also set up a place to keep error and access logs for these sites. You will need to create the directory structure for these manually, but not the individual files (i.e. create the directory structure C:/path/to/your/site/logs but Apache will create the example.local.error.log file for you).

If you are using a portable installation of XAMPP, you may like to try adding this instead:

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
  DocumentRoot "/path/to/your/site"
  ServerName example.local
...
...
</VirtualHost>

Finally, you must include the domain names in your Windows host file. This file can be found at:

C:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc/hosts

open this file in your text editor and add:

127.0.0.1 example.local

You can repeat this procedure for as many sites as you wish.

Optionally, you can use the freeware program called 'Hostsman' that provides a user interface to manage your hosts file. Please make sure that you have administrator rights on your Windows machine.

When you are done, restart Apache. 

Clean URLs

You will also probably want to enable clean URLs. To do this in XAMPP, open up xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf and find this line:

#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

and uncomment it by deleting the hash (#) so that it reads:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Restart Apache and test that clean URLs work on your site. If this doesn't work for some reason, follow the instructions on this handbook page.