Informed Webmaster

If you are just starting out in web programming you might find it handy to install an Apache web server on your Windows machine to work on your project without using a live server installation. I have done this when working on Wordpress themes.

Starting web development is easy: you create a file called something.html, edit it in Notepad, and load it in a browser. Simple sites can be built using this process, but to really explore the possibilities, you need a web server.

How to Install Apache Web Server on Windows

Maybe those who have done this can chime in with which method they used to install Apache on a Widows machine and why.

Over the years I tried and used both Xampp and Wamp. I have never installed any on Windows the old way though I have installed a full LAMP on Linux many times.

Both Xampp and Wamp worked fine, I prefer Xampp because you are not forced to run it as a service (service= means it starts when you boot). You can control when it is running by the use of an icon which loads a BAT file.

Either of these is fine for testing or development but neither are suitable for a production server as they are set up to make things easy and not as secure as possible.

Certainly not the expert but would be happy to try and answer any questions you might have.

Old thread but, IMO the best place for this comment.

In order to get PHP 8.1 on local machine I needed to upgrade my Xampp install. I honestly don't recall whether my version was the old style or via the windows installer. I am saying I may have created all my problems. But am going to report the facts so that it may help someone because there are hundreds of pages out there that don't help with this issue.

I should also say that I visit localhost (127.0. 0.1) on both my local machine and on a VPS. On the vps phpmyadmin does not have the authority to create or drop a DB. Those functions are manged from the Admin control panel (DirectAdmin).

After the install and updating root password all my sites worked just fine. Phpmyadmin threw 2 very confusing error messages.

Error code 200
Error text: OK (rejected)
it seems that the connection to the sever has been lost
Please check your network connectivity and server status.
Click to dismiss this notification

This first error you can spends days reading all those pages I mentioned. My advice is to try a different browser before you do anything else. The causes that are not mentioned on those pages are browser cached pages, cookies and permissions. Clear all cookies for localhost. Clear the cache for localhost and make sure localhost has permission to set cookies. All of this can be done in the browser settings.

The second problem that I encountered was:

The phpMyAdmin configuration storage is not completely configured, some extended features have been deactivated. Find out why.
Or alternately go to 'Operations' tab of any database to set it up there.

When I followed that advice all I saw was drop database highlighted in red. The solution was simple. Somehow root did not have all permissions on the database. Running a simple command line while connected to MariaDB will solve that for you. To grant GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL databases TO 'root'@localhost with the password simply execute this command. I hope this saves at least one person a lot of miserable wasted time.