Installing locally on Windows

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.

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 a browser and go to

Pull up a browser, go to yourdomain.com/sohoadmin, and log-in!