

The perfect testing environment to go wild without any repercussions (well, almost). It’s like taking your car on a racetrack and pushing it to its limits. No server delay, no upload hassles, no unnecessary waiting times. The same with plugins and changing any settings. Want to try a new theme? Just copy and paste it into your wp-content/themes directory. And since it’s hosted locally on my computer, there’s no delay in uploading my changes and see them come alive on the browser. It lets me setup new WordPress installs in a jiffy. Why XAMPP?Īs a professional WordPress developer, I cannot stress enough how beneficial having a local development environment is. X - cross-platform (X), as it supports multiple operating systemsĪpart from the core components mentioned above, XAMPP usually comes with other useful tools such as Mercury mail server, phpMyAdmin for database administration, Webalizer for web server log analysis, OpenSSL, Apache Tomcat for running Java code, and FileZilla FTP server.Here’s what the alphabets in XAMPP stand for:

This explains why it’s the most popular PHP development environment. XAMPP is available for all major operating systems, and is extremely easy to install and use. It’s a completely free, open source Apache server distribution with MariaDB (formerly MySQL), PHP, and Perl. In a nutshell, XAMPP is a local server that you can install on your laptop/desktop to mimic an actual web server. If you prefer a video instead, we’ve got you covered!
