XAMPP
One of the reasons I had settled for Aprelium’s Abyss web server software was because of its simplicity, even though it doesn’t read htaccess, doesn’t do ssl and rewrite (https or simple urls, in plain english if you prefer). But, using Abyss didn’t relieve me of installing and configuring the necessary server-side scripting languages, MySQL, PhpMyAdmin (MySQL web based console) and bbclone (for stats).
And then I found XAMPP.
This is a from zero to a full blown webserver in 5 minutes. Amazing stuff. Like their website says:
XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.
Just download, extract and start. True to every word.
I installed the package, dumped files to be served (my content pages) into htdocs folder and was ready to go. To facilitate the first time user, there’s no master password on access to MySQL or to PhpMyAdmin. But, you could easily set it by going to the security link in localhost page and type in your username and password. No need to mysql -u root password yoursecretpass stuff in the command line. Then set a password for PhpMyAdmin by editing config.inc.php file and it’s as usable as it can get.
I went to localhost/phpmyadmin and created a blank database for wordpress. Then dumped the entire content of wordpress installable files in htdocs folder, edited config.php to include MySQL username and password, and Wordpress was ready to be installed. There was just one other thing. WordPress wasn’t doing the nice url stuff, so I just uncommented (removed the hash, #) from the beginning of this line in apache/conf/httpd.conf file:
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
And mod_rewrite was enabled, I got my nice looking URIs.
The bottomline is that XAMPP makes it so damn easy to run a full blown webserver on your home computer on which, you could run a personal blog, a personal wiki, to-do list, and any web based software for your personal use.
Apache friends, hats off.