Installing locally on Windows

Latest revision as of 17:52, 9 October 2011

Introduction

Here's the rough basics for installing a copy of Pro Edition on your local PC (running Windows XP). Hopefully this page will grow in detail as time allows.

Install PHP/MySQL

You can install Apache too or run PHP/MySQL for IIS. Highly-reccommended and wonderfully-easy way to do this: go grab xampp.

Give your local server a domain name

Pick a domain name (preferrably one that you actually control and could run a live site on if you wanted to) and add an entry to your Windows hosts file.

Your 'hosts' file (it doesn't have a file extension) should be here:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Open your hosts file in your text/code editor of choice (windows notepad will work too) and add this line...

127.0.0.1 yourdomainname.com

Save the file and close all your browser windows.

Create a MySQL database

Get to a mysql command prompt or to a screen where you can run a mysql query. You may be able to get to the prompt or query screen through the MySQL monitor (typically appears as little traffic light icon in your system tray). If you went the xampp route, phpmyadmin is already installed on your local website, so you can just use that to create a database and run. In your browser go to yourdomain.com/phpmyadmin. On the left of the phpmyadmin page, above the "Databases" dropdown box, there's a little icon that says SQL and when you mouse over it an alt tag should pop up that says something like "query window". Click that.

Once you get to the prompt, type these commands...

Create the table...

mysql prompt> create table my_database;[enter key]

Create a user for it...

mysql prompt> grant all privileges on my_database.* to myusername@localhost [enter key]
mysql prompt> identified by 'mypassword' with grant option;[enter key]

Install the software files

Download our free auto-installer (installsoholaunch.php) and stick it in your local docroot folder, which is going to be where ver you specifed it to be when you installed XAMPP (or when you installed PHP/Apache if you did things the hard way). If you installed PHP/MySQL/Apache via XAMPP, it might be something like this...

C:\xampp

OK, now that you've put the installsoholaunch.php file in your local docoot (i.e. C:\xampp), pull up your browser and go to yourdomain.com/installsoholaunch.php and follow the instructions on the screen. That's it! Works just like a normal domain install now!