Installing WordPress On Windows Locally With WAMP
Post Series: Installing WordPress Locally
- Installing WordPress On Mac Locally With MAMP
- Installing WordPress On Windows Locally With WAMP (currently reading)
- Install WordPress On Ubuntu Locally With LAMP
Wouldn’t it be great if you could install and use WordPress on your PC while coding or testing a new theme or plugin? Of course it would! In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to install WordPress in Windows using this great free software called WAMP. You won’t be needing an active internet connection after this – but who am I kidding, internet is like oxygen to us!
So lets get started. You’re going to need the latest version of WAMP and of course, the latest version of WordPress.
Step 1: Installing WAMP
This is a fairly simple step – keep on clicking Next till you see Finish. In case you have a doubt, you could go through the following:
- Its better to leave default installation directory unaltered i.e. “c:/wamp”
- During installation, a prompt will ask you for a “default browser”. It’s explorer.exe. Simply click on Open as shown in the screenshot.
- Click Yes when a prompt for “installing the new WampServer 2 homepage” pops up.
- Add an exception to your firewall for Apache HTTP Server.
- Let the SMTP and Email be set as the default values.
- Once the installation is complete, check the “Launch WampServer 2 now” box and click on Finish.
Step 2: Making sure WAMP is Running
To ensure that WAMP server is running, check the color of the WAMP icon (capital W icon) in your taskbar. Following are the possible situations:
- If the W icon is Red then WAMP server is not running and is offline. You will have to restart the sever or reboot your PC.
- If it is Orange, then the server is partially running, i.e. Apache (you web server) is running and the MySQL service is booting or is offline. You should usually wait around 30 seconds and if the icon still doesn’t turn Green the you should restart the server.
- If it is Green then it means that the server is online and should be accessible from your web browser.
To test if your server’s running, open your favorite browser and enter “localhost” or “127.0.0.1″ in the address bar and see what comes up. You should get this:
Step 3: Create a New Database using phpMyAdmin
- Left click on the WAMP server icon and select phpMyAdmin (second one from the top).
- A new tab/ window should open up in your default browser called phpMyAdmin. Select the Databases tab.
- Enter your desired database name under Create a database (I have chosen: “yousitename_wp”) and click on the Create button.
If successful, you should get a message like this:
Step 4: Extracting the WordPress archive
Close phpMyAdmin and extract the contents of the WordPress ZIP archive under “C:\WAMP\www”. You should find a new folder called wordpress. That’s the WordPress installation directory. If you want to change it – that’s fine. Your WordPress installation will be available under “http://localhost/folder-name”. Thus in our case, its “http://localhost/wordpress”.
Step 5: Configuring your WordPress Installation
- Open your browser and type http://localhost/wordpress in the address bar.
- Click on Create a Configuration file.
- On the next page, click on Let’s Go.
- Fill in the details carefully:
- Database name: yoursitename_wp
- User name: root
- Password: (leave it blank)
- Database Host: localhost
- Table Prefix: xs_ (The default is wp_ but its a good security practice to use some other table prefix)
Click Submit. If the database connection is successful, then you should get this message:
WordPress then creates the necessary tables in the ”yoursitename_wp” database. In the following step, enter your Site Title, Username, Password and the rest of the required data. You should leave the Privacy button unchecked (because we don’t want search engines to index our site in a developmental or experimental stage) and click on Install WordPress.
And you’re done! There you have it! A fully working offline installation of WordPress in your Windows PC using WAMP.
Happy offline blogging! :D
Leave Some Feedback
Let me know how the WAMP install went for you, or if you have any other tips or tricks, in the comments section below.
Seems like a lot of steps to get a local version of WordPress running, have you tried Microsoft’s WebMatrix? It’s a lot quicker and it does most of the install itself without you creating files.
I use it all the time and you can even view any of the files for editing or for creating child themes etc. There’s also a Database view were you can see the actual WordPress database.
I haven’t personally tried WebMatrix, but I’ll check it out. Thanks for the suggestion!
The point of the article was to help those looking to use WAMP not necessarily to point out the best and most effective method for hosting WP locally on a PC. However, Webmatrix does look pretty nice, I’ll have to give it a shot some day – currently coding on a mac though, but still love my custom PC ;)
After using MAMP (equivalent on Mac) I tested AMPPS, http://www.ampps.com and found it much easier to install and configure. They provide WordPress and many, many other applications within the app – just a click to download and install. You can enable Multisite (WPMU) and choose language direct from the setup page. Also easy to create “domains” for installations and place them where ever you want on your computer.
It is also free. It is run by Softaculous and I think they use it to promote the service they sell to web hosts.
Works om Windows and Mac but not on Linux, yet
Didn’t know that! Thanks for pointing it out mate!
Nice write up,
I use Wamp on my Windows Box and for the WordPress install (i create about 30-50 a day) i use my wordpress auto installer for wamp, you might want to check it out.
Looks pretty nice. However, you really only need to install WordPress once because you should just setup a Multi-Site locally so you can quickly add/remove/manage sites.
Not really, when working on multiple languages and testing plugins a multi site install is useless. Also when working on client sites I keep a local install for development and then the move to production is much simpler than a multi site install.
IMHO.
To each their own ;) As a theme/plugin developer I don’t ever need to export a finished site to a live site. I’m sure it can’t be too difficult with MS, than again I’ve never had to do it. The multiple language thing I can see why MS might be a pain in the a**. There isn’t any good plugins for switching languages on an MS site easier?
Sadly none that I know of :/
I use XAMPP and XAMPP Lite to install WordPress locally. But then moving the site to the main domain poses a bigger problem for me, especially with links, etc.
How do you go about this?
This is a script I’ve used before which works very well: https://github.com/interconnectit/Search-Replace-DB
Thanks for the script, when i’m moving WordPress from localhost to live, i have changed them manually,
I think this script will help full for me…
Guys, the reason I created this ‘complex’ tutorial is to show you how to move the offline installation to your online hosting server.
It wouldn’t be complete if you can’t move it right? ;)
Next part of the series coming right up!