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Installing Apache

by Ross Shannon

Having to upload your website’s files to your server every time you make even the smallest change in order to test them can be a pain, but as luck would have it, it is possible to install the Apache webserver locally on Windows. With Apache installed on your machine you can host multiple sites and test your pages and scripts offline before you upload them to the web. This setup is pretty essential to anyone with a website to work on.

Clock This page was last updated on 2025-11-17


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The Vital Components

The most important thing when setting up a local testing server (also commonly known as a “staging server”) is to set it up as similar as possible to the configuration of your online server. This means that if you test your code offline and it works without a hitch, you can be confident that the code is ready to go live.

The vast majority of web hosting companies build their systems on what’s known as the LAMP web server application stack. The LAMP architecture is made up of four components:

  1. Linux, the operating system
  2. Apache, the web server
  3. MySQL, the database management system
  4. PHP, Perl and/or Python, scripting languages

It’s possible to get a fully-loaded LAMP stack running on a Windows machine (I suppose you could call it “WAMP” then, if you had no shame). In fact, Apache, PHP and MySQL are available for most operating systems.

The first step in setting up your server is to download the latest versions of the software. These are easily found at each of the projects’ respective websites.

Apache

Apache is the leading open-source web server software. It is available free from the » Apache website. There are two versions of Apache: Apache 2 and Apache 1.3. Apache 2 is the next generation of Apache, and is still under heavy development. It’s not yet used heavily in production environments, so your online server will probably be based on Apache 1.3, which has been around for longer, is very well tested and is thought to be more stable. The installation instructions below all assume you’re installing Apache 1.3.

PHP

PHP is the most popular and most widely-deployed scripting language on the web. Pick yourself up the latest » Windows binary.

MySQL

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/