Turning your computer into a web server
What’s a web server?!
Its just a piece of software that shows your website to anyone that contacts your computer with the intention of seeing it. A web server with no extras will only reply HTML to a requesting PC, but with some extras it can interpret code (PHP, ASP, JSP…) and with that it can access database servers.
This is the easiest way to do this:
Download Apache web server already set up with PHP and MySQL: XAMPP Lite
Double click on it to extract it to the root of your PC. It must stay in a folder like “C:/xampp“.
IT’S DONE!
Now let’s Start, stop & test XAMPP
Some server scripts:
Apache & MySQL start: .\xampp\xampp_start.exe
Apache & MySQL stop: .\xampp\xampp_stop.exe
Apache start: .\xampp\apache_start.bat
Apache stop: .\xampp\apache_stop.bat
MySQL start: .\xampp\mysql_start.bat
MySQL stop: .\xampp\mysql_stop.bat
Mercury Mailserver start: .\xampp\mercury_start.bat
(Mercury only GUI. Stop with GUI)
FileZilla Server setup: .\xampp\filezilla_setup.bat
FileZilla Server start: .\xampp\filezilla_start.bat
FileZilla Server stop: .\xampp\filezilla_stop.bat
Test: After Apache starts, open the URL http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 and examine all of the XAMPP examples and tools.
You can even do this in your pen disk, so that it will work in any PC you use. If you want to do this, download this application and install it in your pen. After this, download the xampp launcher and install it in the previous application. And it’s done! Now you have a web server in your pen disk, and an elegant way of launching it.
Now you should save all your HTML and PHP files in a folder under “C:\xampp\htdocs\whatever\”.
The end! 
