Now that you know how to setup your XAMPP Lite, it’s time to find your way around XAMPP Lite, and get ready for your first PHP script.

This post will highlight some of the features available in XAMPP, and what you do with them. It’s just a simple overview, so don’t expect anything in detail. Those will follow in later posts.

Default XAMPP Homepage

Make sure you start your XAMPP Lite by executing the xampp_start.exe file.

Open your browser to http://localhost/ and you should get the default XAMPP Homepage like so:

Finding your way around XAMPP

You can find all the XAMPP options listed in the orange sidebar. There are only a few essential items to take note of.

1. Status

This screen shows you the status of your XAMPP environment. All the active items are colored green.

2. Security

This option will show you how secure is your XAMPP installation. The screenshot shows the default state (as in everything red).

For moment, we’ll move on, and leave the security unconfigured, since this is a development environment on your local PC/Notebook - but please remember that if you do deploy your PHP application for public access, don’t forget to take care of the security stuff. For example, you should write note write your PHP application connecting to the MySQL database without MySQL user authentication.

3. phpinfo()

This screen tells you everything about your PHP installation in XAMPP. How it’s configured, where the php.ini config file is located, what Apache version is running, what modules are active etc. Very useful to refer to.

4. phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is your MySQL administration tool. It’s THE best open source app you can have to manage your MySQL installation. You use this to create and manage databases for your application, configure the user access to MySQL, and everything you’ll ever want to do with your MySQL database. Great tool.

5. Webalizer

This tool shows you the traffic coming to your site. Since this is a development environment, webalizer won’t be that useful. In any case, if you do deploy your PHP script to a hosting company, they would typically provide webalizer or equivalent tool as part of the hosting package.

I’ve missed out a few of the other items, like Documentation, Demos etc. I think those are self explanatory, browse them at your leisure.

Well, that’s it. That should give you some idea of where everything is in XAMPP Lite.

• Installing XAMPP Lite on a Portable Storage device
• Writing your first PHP script
• How to get started with PHP?
• First look at CakePHP
• Review: Programming PHP (2nd Edition)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 5:38 pm