XAMPP

Etymology

The term XAMPP is an apparent acronym. However, there is no official acronym expansion specified on the Apache Friends website. Their homepage header reads "XAMPP Apache + MariaDB + PHP + Perl", indicating that this abbreviation is a recursive acronym.

The term can be unofficially broken down as follows:

MySQL was replaced with MariaDB on 19 October 2015 and beginning with XAMPP versions 5.5.30 and 5.6.14,^[7] effectively altering the meaning of the acronym.

While both letters P are de facto interchangeable, convention used at the Apache Friends website indicates that the first letter P is short for PHP and the latter letter P is short for Perl.

Prerequisites

XAMPP requires only one zip, tar, 7z, or exe file to be downloaded and run, and little or no configuration of the various components that make up the web server is required.^[8] The Windows version of XAMPP requires Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable.

Features

XAMPP is regularly updated to the latest releases of Apache, MariaDB, PHP and Perl. It also comes with a number of other modules including OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin, MediaWiki, Joomla, WordPress and more.^[9] Self-contained, multiple instances of XAMPP can exist on a single computer, and any given instance can be copied from one computer to another.^[10] XAMPP is offered in both a full and a standard version (Smaller version).^[10]

Software Integration

The web server solution stack installed in Personal PC or the development system faces common issues of having the common port numbers requested by XAMPP. Most commonly Skype or MySQL installed in PC have common conflict due to the same port number being requested by XAMPP. Although a port number conflict can be bypassed by stopping the applications using the same port, the better solution is to change the port number. The most common MySQL port can be found in my.ini, config.inc.php and php.ini files from XAMPP control panel.^[11]

The port number are 3306 for MySQL, 80 for Apache and 443 for SSL, the port numbers can be replaced with subsequent number like 3307 or 3308. Find the port numbers in respective files, for which port need to be changed, then replace with subsequent port number. the same port numbers should also be replaced in XAMPP Service and Port number settings.

Usage

The most obvious characteristic of XAMPP is the ease at which a WAMP webserver stack can be deployed and instantiated.^[12] Later some common packaged applications that could be easily installed were provided by Bitnami.^[13]

Officially, XAMPP's designers intended it for use only as a development tool, to allow website designers and programmers to test their work on their own computers without any access to the Internet. To make this as easy as possible, many important security features are disabled by default.^[14] XAMPP has the ability to serve web pages on the World Wide Web.^[15] A special tool is provided to password-protect the most important parts of the package.^[16]

XAMPP also provides support for creating and manipulating databases in MariaDB and SQLite among others.

Once XAMPP is installed, it is possible to treat a localhost like a remote host by connecting using an FTP client. Using a program like FileZilla has many advantages when installing a content management system (CMS) like Joomla or WordPress^{[further explanation needed]}. It is also possible to connect to localhost via FTP with an HTML editor.

Components

See also

• Lighttpd
• List of Apache–MySQL–PHP packages
• List of Nginx–MySQL–PHP packages

References

External links

• Official website
• Interview with Kai Seidler from the XAMPP project — interview by Lenz Grimmer, MySQL
• Installing, Configuring, and Developing with XAMPP — article by Dalibor D. Dvorski, Skills Canada - Ontario
• Acronym of XAMPP — Taken from Abbreviations.com, a site by STANDS4 LLC
• XAMPP In General — article by Owusu-Ansah Godfred, Global Health Data Management