Thread

I’ve spent 1/2 day trying to find any articles or tutorial on installing EE locally.

I did find the one here that uses EasyPHP: http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Complete_copy_of_the_website_on_localhost/

EasyPHP runs horribly for me {WINXP-PRO}, and will never allow me to add a database—yah,  one of the early steps.

I’ve had luck in the past {WordPress} using XAMPP, so I’m trying to use that, except I don’t know what settings to use.  I can get Apache running, but it looks like mysql is being blocked locally, preventing it to run.  *sigh*

Surely others are working locally on Windows machines.

Thanks in advance!

I just googled: “Installing ExpressionEngine Locally” and my post above is ranked #1.  And that was 1/2 hour ago.  Fast indexing, but also embarrassing, I imagine.

You shouldn’t have any trouble running EE on XAMPP. While I don’t currently have EE on XAMPP (I use a local server install), I’ve done it in the past and use XAMPP all the time for other things.

Set up XAMPP as usual. Launch Apache and MySQL with the XAMPP control panel. Then with your browser go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ and create the database for EE, say “db_sitename”. Put the EE directory (“sitename”) into the xampp htdocs folder and go to http://localhost/sitename/ to access the install script. Use “db_sitename” for the database name, “localhost” for the host, “root” as the username and don’t use a password. Fill out the rest of the fields and install EE as usual.

If you’ve set up MySQL with a real user/password instead of the default, you have to use that pair or set up another user with phpMyAdmin. But there’s no security problem on a local install, so don’t bother.

Thanks.  I think there was a registry issue.  I grabbed a new XAMPP install and started over.
Things didn’t take effect until I deselected the svc boxes nest to Apache/MySql and re-selected them.  I knew XAMPP was easy, but dealing with the registry is not. 

Thanks for your help!

Just so you know, I tried to copy an existing client’s site into a local version of EE, but it broke - until I did a “selected tables only” backup that did NOT include the exp_site table. That table must have held some very location-specific settings, and the entire thing froze up - couldn’t even load the control panel. Leaving the existing exp_site table alone allowed everything to work just fine. Never found out the specifics why, however.

Glad you got it working otherwise!

Terry