Reading yesterday of Mauricio’s problems with the Geekzone outage, I decided to review my backup procedures. I’ve always run an automated backup off this blog on a weekly basis, but in all honestly never knew for sure if I could actually restore from the backup. So this morning I decided to install a full version of WordPress on my local machine.

This necessitated installing all the MySQL, PHP, Apache goodness that we take for granted on our ISP. I found this fantastic guide to getting it all set up from scratch on a local machine – cheers to the GAS gang. We’re half way there – WordPress is up and running on my machine – part two is getting my backup off the web and restored to the local instance.

This will not only help with security but will allow a development platform to play with design without working on the live site.

Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP


1- Get XAMPP lite for Windows. Choose the exe version, and install it at the root of your C drive.

2- Browse to C:\xampplite and double click setup_xampp.bat

3- Once that is done, double click xampp-control.exe and start the Apache and Mysql services.

4- Open your browser and go to this address: http://localhost/. From the menu on the left column, choose your preferred language.

5- Now that the interface displays a language that you can understand, click on phpMyAdmin (on the left column once again)

6- Enter “wordpress” (without quotes) in the “Create New Database” Field, and select utf8_unicode_ci in the drop down box in the next field (as shown in the picture below). Click on Create. The Xampp setup is now complete.

7- Download WordPress and unzip it under c:\xampplite\htdocs.

8- You should now have a wordpress folder under c:\xampplite\htdocs. Browse to the folder, and you will see a file named wp-config-sample.php. Open it in your favourite text editor and replace the default values by the ones you see under this paragraph. Save the file as wp-config.php (under the same folder).

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘root’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ”); // …and password (needs to be empty, just for local install)
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

9- Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php , follow the instructions, and voila, you are done.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

2 Comments
  • Rather than installing WordPress under Windows XP I use the free VMware Server to create virtual machines.

    In the virtual machine I have installed Ubuntu Server. This comes includes the Apache, MySQL and PHP components needed for WordPress. I then easily mirror my hosting environment locally, using the same userid, passwords and directory tree.

    This makes it easy to backup and restore from one environment to another. It also simple to ZIP the virtual machines to make complete server back-ups.

    Ubuntu Server runs happily with 64MB of RAM and has proven worthwhile for me.

    I have Ubuntu virtual machines for each web site, plus others with Windows 2000 to test Internet Explorer versions.

    If you have not yet tried using one of the virtual machine tools then I recommend giving them a try.

  • Thank you so much! It worked finally. Great clear simple tutorial

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