How to set up Wordpress on a Hard Drive

How to set up Wordpress on Your Hard Drive

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xampp/Wordpress I’ve found that having wordpress installed on my hard drive makes things like building layouts, testing changes to my blog, testing plugins, etc so much quicker and easier (not to mention getting to avoid those awkward moments after the initial upload, when you realize you forgot a stray punctuation mark).

We’ll be setting up wordpress on our hard drive using XAMPP. Once installed this will also allow you to test php layouts without having to upload them. I’m using Windows so that’s what this tutorial will cover. It shouldn’t be too different to repeat the process on other OSs (Robert set it up on Mac OSX by following this tutorial). This tutorial and the previous statement is based under the assumption that the user has a basic idea of installing applications in their operating system of choice.

Download XAMPP
Extract it to your hard drive’s root directory
Go to the xampplite folder
Run setup_xampp.bat
Run xampp-control.exe
start Apache & MySQL
Open your web browser and go to http://localhost
Select your language
Go to phpMyAdmin
Create a new database with any name you want (I’ll just be using wordpress) with utf8_unicode_ci collation (it’s the very last option in the drop down menu)
Download the latest version of Wordpress
Extract to C:\xampplite\htdocs and rename the extracted folder to your database’s name
Open wp-confg-sample.php in your text editor and change the following information
Change putyourdbnamehere to the name of your database/folder
Change usernamehere to root
Completely delete yourpasswordhere, just leave the ”
Save the file as wp-config.php
In your browser go to http://localhost/YOURDBNAME/wp-admin/install.php
Enter your blog’s name and your email address and press the install button
You’ll be given your login name and password, write them down
Now just login and you’ll be in the wordpress dashboard. From here everything is just like your online wordpress setup.

That’s it! Now just go have fun, and if you have any questions, I’m sure you know someone to ask who can help you. Just kidding, feel free to leave it in a comment. Pretty sure someone will get back to you.

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11 Comments »

Matt said:

Nice tutorial. A buddy of mine just turned me onto xampp not too long ago. Good work!

Matts last blog post..WordPress welcome back script

# 10 September 2008 at 5:31 am

Angie Bowen said:

@Matt - Thanks so much! I was nervous since it was my first tutorial.

# 12 September 2008 at 12:31 am

Livi said:

I had a bit of an issue installing getting this to work.

Everything worked, except I wasn’t able to publish any articles. I could write new posts, but I was unable to publish them. Additinally, I wasn’t be able to edit them after creating them either. After some searching on the web, I found this link:

http://www.apachefriends.org/f/viewtopic.php?t=29577&sid=8455d392b6a4c21a9d3e96141cbf914a

Apparently the integer count was rediculously high, and causing a problem.

This particular post solved my problem:

“Another work-around: before you install, edit wp-admin/include/schema.php and replace all instances of bigint(20) with int(11).”

I deleted the mySQL database I had previously built using the Wordpress install, and then edited the schema.php file. When I reinstalled wordpress with the new schema.php file, it worked perfectly.

Thanks for the tutorial. It helped.
Cheers!

# 19 September 2008 at 8:39 pm

Robert Bowen said:

@ Livi, sorry that it was acting up on you. We did three installs, two on windows, and one on a mac to test it out, and didn’t have any of the problems you listed above. So thanks for the heads-up and way to resolve the issue.

Glad it could help.

# 21 September 2008 at 9:28 am

Beth said:

@Livi

You saved me so much headache with that tip, thank you! I’m new all this (modifying wordpress themes and anything server side), and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.

# 24 September 2008 at 11:29 am

Beth said:

Oh, and much thanks for the original tutorial as well!

# 24 September 2008 at 11:30 am