This article is for my students learning PHP, or for any student that wants to learn PHP and uses a Windows computer for that.

For this we will install:

XAMPP, which is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

You can download it from: https://www.apachefriends.org/

XAMPP installs together:

• Apache
• MariaDB
• PHP
• Perl

Install WAMPP instead of XAMP (if you prefer WAMPP)

Alternatively you can install WAMPP, which installs:

• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP
• PHPMyAdmin

https://www.wampserver.com/en/

Development IDE

As Development Environment we will use PHPStorm, from Jetbrains.

https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/

Testing the installation of XAMPP

The default directory for the PHP files is C:\xampp\htdocs

Create a file in c:\xampp\htdocs named hello.php

<?php
$s_today = date("Y-m-d");
echo "Hello! Today is ".$s_today;
?>

Now start Apache:

1. Open the XAMPP Control Panel
2. Start the Apache Server

And test the new page, with the browser, opening:

http://localhost/hello.php