When I first started to develop in PHP, I did not own a domain name, and I did not have a hosting account. I had nowhere to test my ideas or practice my programming, so I knew I needed to create an environment on my desktop that would allow me to develop easily, speedily and securely. I also had no budget for software.
Fortunately, the three tools I needed were all free – Apache, MySQL and PHP. Let me talk you through them:
Apache
Apache Web Server has been in use since the mid-1990s and is now used to run more than half of all websites. Originally developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), nowadays the software is maintained and developed by the Apache Software Foundation and is now open source software (making it very cost effective). Various modules extend the core functionality of the server and allows various sites to be hosted on one installation.
MySQL
MySQL is relational database management system that is very robust and scalable. It is very popular, even amongst high-profile websites – Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia and Google are known to use MySQL. Available under the GNU General Public License, MySQL makes it an ideal choice for projects with small budgets. It also integrates well with PHP and there are a number of graphical administration tools available to supplement the native command line interface.
PHP
PHP, which originally stood for Personal Home Page, was developed around the same time as Apache. Since then it has undergone several changes as of today PHP 5 is in common use all over the Web. It is a server-side language, i.e. it runs on server, as opposed to a client-side language like Javascript. This makes it ideal for web development and is used on many websites including Digg, Facebook, Yahoo! and thousands of Wordpress blogs. Once again, this software is available free of charge.
So there we have it – the trinity of components needed for free web development. The best thing is that these are available for a number of platforms, the two most popular being Linux (LAMP) and Windows (WAMP). There are several programs available for installing Apache, MySQL and PHP together – I’d recommend Wampserver. This makes setting up a local web development environment very easy. Just download, run the executable and go! Make sure that you have your firewall configured to block external web traffic to ports 80 and 443 (the default ports for HTTP and HTTPS) until you’re ready to test your site externally.
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