WordPress Local Installation

To develop a template, solve problems or test something without risk using the site, a local Wordpress installation is required.

To do this, you can use a local server such as Wamp, XAMPP, or InstantWP. The latter is simpler, but only works with WP, while the rest allow you to locally test other programs or scripts.

Installation using XAMPP is performed in 3-5 stages, depending on whether the method is simple or technical

Simple method

1) Installing XAMPP

It is automatic to download the latest version and run the executable. Click the software on the start menu to display the control panel.

2) Install the plugin with bits

After downloading and launching, this plugin installs itself in the xampp directory, it downloads and configures the latest version of Wordpress. You have nothing to do.
Bitnami.

3) Launching Wordpress

Open the control panel and click the Start button next to Apache and MySQL. Then open a browser and type it in the URL bar:

localhost/wordpress

Is that all!

Technical method

To better control the installation and if you are familiar with Wordpress .

1) Install local server

If a site must use meaningful permalians, with the/% postname% option, they will only work locally when the rewrite module is enabled.
To enable it, open the XAMPP menu, open the Apache configuration and check the box on the rewrite_module.

2) Install WordPress

Cancel WordPress archiving in

\wamp\apps\wordpress

You can also use virtualhost to install multiple sites, but this is a different topic.

3) Create a database

To do this, launch phpMyAdmin in the XAMPP menu (MySQL Explorer), and in phpMyAdmin open the Databases panel and click the Create database button, specifying the selected database name in the field.

4) Fill in wp-ef.php file

With the latest versions of Wordpress, this is unnecessary. On the contrary, you need to erase the wp-config.php file and when you click on the wordpress directory from the Wamp list, the creation procedure starts.
To make it work, you should not give a password if the database has already been created (as above).

If we prefer to create a file manually, here's the procedure to follow...

In the root of the wordpress directory, you can find the wp-config-example.php file. Rename it to wp-config.php.

<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');
define('DB_USER', 'root');
define('DB_PASSWORD', ''); 
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');  
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

// You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix
$table_prefix  = 'wp_';   // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!

// Change this to localize WordPress.  A corresponding MO file for the
// chosen language must be installed to wp-content/languages.
// For example, install de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to 'de'
// to enable German language support.
define ('WPLANG', 'fr_FR');
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',false);

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__).'/');
require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php');
?>

The database name (DB_NAME) is a name created using phpMyAdmin. "wordpress" is an example.
Username (DB_USER): root
Password: No.
Server (DB_HOST): localhost.
Charset: you choose, utf8 by default.
Language: you choose, nothing for English, for French fr-FR. You will need to install the corresponding mo-file in/wp-includes/languings/.

Revisions are not part of the default configuration file, you need to add a line: disable them if your site does not work as a wiki, so as not to saturate the database.

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

5) Get started

Click the Wamp icon on the desktop to start the local server. On the taskbar, the Wamp icon turns green. Click it to display the menu.

Click localhost on the Wamp menu. Click wordPress. An error message appears, you must specify the path:

http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

In fact, you can enter the URL directly into the browser bar.

Click Install and finish.

Import blog content

If you already have an online blog, you can find content with the export command on the site, and import locally. This may, in particular, allow you to check compatibility with the new version of Wordpress before installing it.

In this case, you need to increase the size allocated to PHP memory in the php.ini file of the Wamp php subdirectory:

memory_limit = 64M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (8MB)