How to install XAMPP

XAMPP is a full-featured AMPP (Apache MySQL, PHP, Perl) package that is one of the few non-commercial AMPP middleware stacks available on Linux. With its tight integration, XAMPP makes it possible to run anything from a personal home page to a full-featured production site (though only for development purposes; XAMPP is not meant to be used on a production server due to security issues).

XAMPP really shines in the following areas:

• It is easy to install and set up.
• It contains a number of useful packages that make it easy to do things like generate traffic reports and accelerate PHP content.
• It has been thoroughly tested on the SUSE, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Debian Linux distributions, as well as on Windows® and Solaris.

For this article, we will install XAMPP under Mandrake Linux 10.0. Let’s start by looking at the default packages that come with XAMPP.

To install XAMPP, download the latest binary from the Apache Friends Web site (see Resources for a link). Untar it to /opt using the following command:

tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.4.7.tar.gz -C /opt

That’s it! XAMPP is now installed in /opt/lampp. Any previous installations that were in /opt have been overwritten. If you are running an older version of XAMPP and don’t want to download the entire package again, Apache Friends has an upgrade package available for download.

Now that everything is installed, let’s start the new daemons. Change your current working directory to /opt/lampp (cd /opt/lampp) and enter the following:

./lampp start

You should see the following:

Starting XAMPP for Linux 1.4.7…
XAMPP: Starting Apache with SSL (and PHP5)…
XAMPP: Starting MySQL…
XAMPP: Starting ProFTPD…
XAMPP for Linux started.

XAMPP is now up and running. The best way to verify this is to open a browser and type localhost in the address bar and hit the Enter key. You should be redirected to the XAMPP welcome page.

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