How To Install WordPress On Your Mac With XAMPP

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi everyone, and welcome to Tubetorial. I’m Lorraine Nepomuceno.

If you create WordPress themes or plug-ins, one of the most useful things you can do is install WordPress on your computer. That way, you can do all your testing and tweaking “locally”, without having to connect to a web host or server. Today, I want to show you how to install WordPress on your Mac, running on OSX, very quickly and easily using an application called XAMPP.

The first thing you want to do is download XAMPP. You want the version for OSX. Save it to your computer, open up the .dmg file, then install it by dragging it into your Applications folder.

That’s how quick it is to install XAMPP. Now, go into your Applications folder, and open up the XAMPP application.

This is the XAMPP control window, and since we’re going to be installing WordPress, we want to get Apache and MySQL running. Simply click on “Start”… you’ll need to type in your administrator password.

Now let’s install WordPress. Back in the XAMPP folder, open up the folder named “htdocs”

I’ve got a copy of the latest WordPress here, and I’m going to drag it into the htdocs folder. I want to rename this to local dash WordPress.

Now, I need to create a MySQL database for this WordPress installation. To do this, I go into my browser, and in the URL window, type localhost/. This opens up the XAMPP browser for me. Over on the left sidebar, I’ll click on phpMyAdmin, which is where I administer my MySQL databases.

So let’s create a database. Here, beneath “Create a Database”, I’ll type local-wp, leave everything else as is, and click Create.

Now that’s done, I want to make sure WordPress can access the database I just created. So I go back to my htdocs folder, open up local-wordpress, and edit the wp-config-sample.php file.

I’m typing in the name of my database here, local-wp. The username is “root”, and there is no password, so I’ll leave that blank. I’ll save this, and change the name of the file to wp-config.php

And finally… let’s install WordPress. In my browser, I go to localhost/local-wordpress/

And there it is! The WordPress installation window. Let’s go ahead and install this… then load the page… and it looks like all went well.

You can do this for multiple instances of WordPress just by creating new folders in the htdocs directory. It makes it so much easier to test and tweak WordPress themes and plug-ins.