WordPress Logo

I’ve been working with WordPress offline for very practical purposes. It lets me try out themes without having to consume bandwidth on my web host. I just use it whenever I’m trying out my meager skills with PHP, MySQL, and WordPress. I haven’t really thought of letting others know how I do it until a web designer friend of mine asked me to help her out on how to run WordPress locally without having online server access. So here I am making a hasty how-to on the matter.

The first time I tried it, it really ran smoothly that I don’t know if it’d work for all. So I have to place a little disclaimer here that, while it worked for me, I’m not guaranteeing that it’d work 100% smoothly for you too (since we have different machines, apps installed and configurations). But here’s what I did.

Download XAMPP

Of all the apps that installs the Apache web server, MySQL and PHP, XAMPP has proven to be the easiest to install for me. If you ask me, it really takes a genius to manually install Apache, MySQL and PHP on your machine and make them work flawlessly.

Since I’m no certified MENSA member, I tried XAMPP. I downloaded this one with the installer package. And lo and behold, it’s almost a one-step installation for me.

NOTE: This was done on an Intel-based PC with Windows XP.

Install XAMPP

NOTE: Installation processes may vary depending on your machine (Mac or Linux) so better check the XAMPP website for other details. Mac users may find more on installing XAMPP here.

With the Windows installer package, the XAMPP installation process is easy. The most work I did for this one to set the installation path. I set mine to one of my workspace drives. I didn’t check the boxes asking me if I’d like to run components as services. I don’t know if that would affect this process, but just to be sure, leave them unchecked.

XAMPP Installer

Run XAMPP Control Panel

Just start Apache and MySQL. Once you get the green lights on both, you’re ready to go.

XAMPP Control Panel

Reconfigure your MySQL user details

Now that XAMPP (with Apache server and MySQL) is running, your machine is now also acting as a localhost. And yup, that’s right, that means that you can now access the localhost through your web browser. Accessing http://localhost/ via the address bar will bring you too XAMPP’s interface. It acts pretty much like your host’s cPanel.

XAMPP Index

Now the first thing to do is to modify XAMPP’s security settings by clicking on security. It’s better to be safe than sorry. You can change your passwords to the MySQL power user and XAMPP directory access on this page http://localhost/security/xamppsecurity.php.

XAMPP Security Settings

NOTE: Just in case you keep forgetting your security settings (usernames and passwords), you can check the “Safe plain password in text file?” box so you can access them in your /security folder. But as XAMPP indicates, it’s a security risk.

Create database for WordPress

Now that you’ve configured the security settings, you can now create a MySQL database for WordPress through the PHPMyAdmin interface. Just access it via the XAMPP sidebar and create a new database. In my case, I named it wordpress.

PHPMyAdmin Create Database

Download and unzip WordPress

Now get the WordPress engine from WordPress.org. Unzip WordPress in htdocs folder in your XAMPP’s installation path. The htdocs folder serves like your public_html in your web host server. Think of Windows Explorer as your FTP in this case.

Modify the wp-config-sample.php

Open the wp-config-sample.php in the WordPress directory with a text editor (or whatever editor you may have). You only need to modify three lines here, the DB_NAME, DB_USER, and DB_PASSWORD which are wordpress, root, and test, respectively in my case. Save it as wp-config.php.

WordPress Configuration

Install WordPress

Now if you followed this process, go to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php in your web browser to go through the WordPress installation process which would just be a few clicks. Your blog will be at http://localhost/wordpress/.

Post Script

So there you go, I hope this little tutorial helps. I’d appreciate some comments and feedback. It worked for me, so I hope it’d work for you too.

Related Posts