Installing a PHP server on Windows (AppServ)

Hello,

If you want to turn your Windows operating system into a server that can run PHP scripts with an Apache PHP server and create a MySQL database, AppServ will be an ideal application for you. It comes with Apache Server, PHP compiler, Php My Admin, and MySQL components. At the time I was preparing this post, AppServ 8.6.0 was the current release. Just let me mention one small detail: AppServ does not work on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003; apart from those, you can use it with peace of mind on other Windows versions.

First, we go to the address https://www.appserv.org/en/download/ and download the application.

I’ll skip the standard installation steps; we just click Next as if installing a game

When the screen where we choose which modules to install appears, we select the modules we want according to our needs.

In the next step, we need to fill in the Server Name (server name) and Email address fields. You can write Localhost for the server name; the email isn’t very important either.

In the next step, we need to enter the MySQL information. The password entered here will be the MySQL Root password. You may need it for operations such as password resetting. As for the Character Set field, you can also edit it later according to your needs.

On the final screen, we click FINISH and complete the process.

As you can see, setting up an Apache Server and MySQL database is this easy.

To run our HTML or PHP files, we just need to create a folder inside “C:AppServwww” in our computer’s root directory and put them in it.

We created a “test” folder inside “C:AppServwww”.

We created an “index.html” file inside the “Test” folder.

Finally, to access the HTML file we created, we can access it by typing localhost/folder_name in our browser (http://localhost/test)

I hope this has been helpful.

In my upcoming posts, I will go into details about creating a database and PHP coding.