

Installing XAMPP is a pretty straightforward process, with no special technical skills required. As such, regardless of your setup, you can download XAMPP for your Operating System directly from their website. Downloading XAMPPĪs discussed earlier, XAMPP is available for all major Operating Systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac. Of course, you can equally download and install each package individually, and the final result will be the same – provided you’re comfortable getting your hands dirty with configuration files. XAMPP makes it easy to install everything we need to build a WordPress staging environment in one convenient package. In this case, you can download XAMPP for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Geek note: The X in XAMPP indicates that it’s available for several Operating Systems. With XAMPP and Bitnami, we can have a full staging environment up and running within minutes. Bitnami is a packaged applications software product by VMware that allows us to install modules such as WordPress as easily as we would install any other software. One other thing that comes with XAMPP, which you might appreciate, is Bitnami for XAMPP. While this is not required to run WordPress, more technical WordPress administrators might use this to write scripts. On a side-note, XAMPP also includes Perl. Instead of installing each item individually, we get one installer that provides for everything, making it that much easier to install all of the components we need without worrying about dependencies and configurations. XAMPP includes all of the above in one, easy-to-install package. This is required since the WordPress code needs to be executed by the webserver, which we can only do if PHP is installed. PHP – PHP is the language WordPress is written in and is required by WordPress to run.

MariaDB has, in the meantime, become one of the most used RDBMS.

Due to concerns with this acquisition, several MySQL developers forked out development to MariaDB. Geek note: MySQL was acquired by Oracle back in 2009. It’s important to note that many people and organizations use the terms interchangeably. While most are familiar with the MySQL flavor of SQL, in many cases, what you get is MariaDB. SQL Database – WordPress uses a SQL database to store data. There are many different web servers available including Nginx, Apache, and IIS, with XAMPP including Apache. Web Server – The web server is what actually delivers the WordPress website. However, the server also needs a number of software packages to run WordPress. The server or hosting plan, on which all the components are installed and run, and the domain name are two things we are all familiar with. WordPress needs quite a few things to run.
