Appendix A

In this process we shall be installing a suite called XAMPP - X (cross plaftorm), Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl. To check whether XAMPP is installed or not, check if C:\xampp already exists or if xampp is already running in the system tray.

To install XAMPP on a Windows computer, the following are the steps:

1. Download XAMPP from https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html

2. The website will start downloading the installation files. The file is large, thus it’ll take some time to download.

3. Once XAMPP is downloaded, the following screen will come up. Click next.

4. Uncheck Filezilla FTP Server, Mercury FTP Server, Tomcat, Perl unless it is required otherwise. Click Next.

5. Leave this setting as-is, and move on to the next step.

6. Click next to start the install

7.  This step will take a while. Please wait until this is complete.

8. Make sure the control panel option is checked and click Finish.

9. This control panel will come up. Next to Apache, click Start. If the button displays ‘Stop’ instead of ‘Start’, then it might already be running.

10. Once everything is started, Apache and MySQL will have a green background and the ports will show up

11. To check that XAMPP is working, navigate to http://localhost and this screen should come up

Running PHP Programs on the local server.

To create a program in PHP navigate to C:/xampp/htdocs

Create a new folder named ‘test’ (or any name of your choice).

Inside that folder, create a file called index.php and open it with notepad or any other text editor you have.

Inside index.php, write the following code:

<?php echo "Hello Web World"; ?>

Save the file, and then go to this link: http://localhost/test/index.php or http://127.0.0.1/test/index.php

Please note that there is no domain extension such as (.com, .net, .org) after localhost.

If you followed all the steps correctly, you should get something like this: