In order for a website to be visible on the internet, it must be hosted. Whether you know it or not, you have a host right under your nose. On your own machine, you can set up what is called a localhost and create a website that resides on your hard drive. In order to make this happen, you will need 3 parts: Apache, which is a web server; MySQL, a database management system; and PHP, the language needed to build dynamic websites. Hence, you have the acronym AMP. Thankfully, there are applications that integrate all of these together so they can be downloaded all at once. The one we will discuss has 3 different flavors depending on which operating system you are planning to install it on. Below is a separate section for each, outlining the steps you will need to complete.

Windows

First, download the wampserver software from the wampserver website and run the resulting .exe file. The wizard will walk you through the screens to ultimately create the wamp folder structure that was displayed in the previous post, excluding the drupal-7.8 folder. You should now have a startup icon available so that whenever you click on it, another icon appears in the bottom right corner that you can then click on to display the wampserver menu. Make sure all of the services are started up.

Next, surf to drupal.org and download the latest version of Drupal 7. The result will be a file that has a tar.gz extension, referred to as a tarball. You may need to download software such as 7-zip to unzip this file. If you are using Windows 7, bring up the 7-zip file manager, find the file in your downloads folder, right-click on it, select 7-zip then ‘extract here’ from the popout menu. This will create a second file with only a .tar extension. Right-click on this file, select 7-zip then ‘extract here’ from the popout menu. Your resulting drupal-7.8 folder should then be visible. From Windows Explorer, move that folder into the www folder under the wamp folder.

Finally, bring up phpMyAdmin from the wampserver menu and create an empty database with a file name of your choosing. Then invoke a file named install.php from the root Drupal directory by typing the URL 'localhost/drupal-7.8/install.php' into your browser. Walk through the installation steps and you should now have a new site !!

Linux

First, download the XAMPP for Linux software at:
apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html
From the terminal, enter the following command to extract the archive file into the /opt directory:
tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.6.8a.tar.gz -C /opt
Whenever you need to start up your installation, type:
/opt/lampp/lampp start

Next, surf to drupal.org and download the latest version of Drupal 7. The result will be a file that has a tar.gz extension, referred to as a tarball. You may need to download software such as 7-zip to unzip this file. Bring up the 7-zip file manager, find the file in your downloads folder, right-click on it, select 7-zip then ‘extract here’ from the popout menu. This will create a second file with only a .tar extension. Right-click on this file, select 7-zip then ‘extract here’ from the popout menu. Your resulting drupal-7.8 folder should then be visible. From the File System screen, move that folder into the lampp folder under the opt/lampp folder.

Finally, bring up your localhost and select phpMyAdmin from the tools section on the menu and create an empty database with a file name of your choosing. Then invoke a file named install.php from the root Drupal directory by typing the URL 'localhost/drupal-7.8/install.php' into your browser. Walk through the installation steps and you should now have a new site !!

Mac

First, download the MAMP software at:
mamp.info/en/download.html
Unzip the file to create a disk image with a .dmg extension. When you open this, the installer will prompt you to the MAMP folder into the Applications folder. Inside this folder is a new folder named MAMP , in which are some subfolders, one of which is the MAMP executable that will be used whenever you want to bring up the control window. From there, you can click the 'Start Servers' button to start up the services.

Next, surf to drupal.org and download the latest version of Drupal 7. The result will be a file that has a tar.gz extension, referred to as a tarball. You may need to download software such as 7-zip to unzip this file. Bring up the 7-zip file manager, find the file in your downloads folder, right-click on it, select 7-zip then ‘extract here’ from the popout menu. This will create a second file with only a .tar extension. Right-click on this file, select 7-zip then ‘extract here’ from the popout menu. Your resulting drupal-7.8 folder should then be visible. From the Finder screen, move that folder into the htdocs folder under the MAMP folder.

Finally, go to Preferences in the MAMP control window, click on the Ports tab, click on the 'Set to default Apache and MySQL ports' button, and click OK. This will allow you to bring up your localhost without appending :8888 onto the end of it. Now click on the 'Open start page' button and click on the phpMyAdmin link and create an empty database with a file name of your choosing. Then invoke a file named install.php from the root Drupal directory by typing the URL 'localhost/drupal-7.8/install.php' into your browser. Walk through the installation steps and you should now have a new site !!

You should now have a working Drupal installation no matter which operating system you are using. In the next post of the series, we will discuss the module installation process.