What's the easiest way to test PHP on Windows XP Professional?
I want to test some PHP on my local Windows XP Professional machine. I am familiar with PHP coding for upload, but not with running a web server.
What's the easiest way to set up a test environment? Step by step instructions would be great if you can provide them.
(I see WAMP is recommended in this thread - thoughts?)
Update - after a year
A bit of self-promotion: After using XAMPP for a long time, I started wanting things that it didn't include. (The PDO support was great - every time I tried to enable pdo and mysqli at the same time, something crashed.) I ended up working on the Apache, PHP, MySQL, and PHPMyAdmin installation process separately and documented the process with screenshots on my blog.
Some of the configuration I was able to do this way could have been done in XAMPP, but that was only because I had to tweak myself that I discovered new things (like being able to serve files from c: \ whatever instead of c: \ program files \ apache \ htdocs).
Overall, I am happier by setting these items separately. But XAMPP was a good (and light) package to start with and served me well when I used it.
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alt text http://www.apachefriends.org/images/1240.jpg
Xampp is the simplest. You can configure everything in stages, and if you need additional configuration (Virtual Server, extension), you have a regular php.ini and another file in the directory that you can edit yourself.
Here is a Step by Step installation for Windows.
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XAMPP from ApacheFriends is fairly straightforward to set up and use.
note the site seems to be down at 15:02 UTC on Dec 3, 2008
notice again and it is back!
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Instead of WAMP, I recommend XAMPP for Cross Platform (X), Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl, all in one package. It's very simple to set up and use, and like WAMP, an icon is placed in the system tray to control it all.
You can get it here: www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html . This site also contains comprehensive instructions for getting started quickly and easily.
There is even a portable version available at http://portableapps.com/apps/development/xampp .
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