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Reading yesterday of Mauricio’s problems with the Geekzone outage, I decided to review my backup procedures. I’ve always run an automated backup off this blog on a weekly basis, but in all honestly never knew for sure if I could actually restore from the backup. So this morning I decided to install a full version of Wordpress on my local machine.

This necessitated installing all the MySQL, PHP, Apache goodness that we take for granted on our ISP. I found this fantastic guide to getting it all set up from scratch on a local machine - cheers to the GAS gang. We’re half way there - Wordpress is up and running on my machine - part two is getting my backup off the web and restored to the local instance.

This will not only help with security but will allow a development platform to play with design without working on the live site.

Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP

1- Get XAMPP lite for Windows. Choose the exe version, and install it at the root of your C drive.

2- Browse to C:\xampplite and double click setup_xampp.bat

3- Once that is done, double click xampp-control.exe and start the Apache and Mysql services.

4- Open your browser and go to this address: http://localhost/. From the menu on the left column, choose your preferred language.

5- Now that the interface displays a language that you can understand, click on phpMyAdmin (on the left column once again)

6- Enter “wordpress” (without quotes) in the “Create New Database” Field, and select utf8_unicode_ci in the drop down box in the next field (as shown in the picture below). Click on Create. The Xampp setup is now complete.

7- Download Wordpress and unzip it under c:\xampplite\htdocs.

8- You should now have a wordpress folder under c:\xampplite\htdocs. Browse to the folder, and you will see a file named wp-config-sample.php. Open it in your favourite text editor and replace the default values by the ones you see under this paragraph. Save the file as wp-config.php (under the same folder).

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘root’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ”); // …and password (needs to be empty, just for local install)
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

9- Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php , follow the instructions, and voila, you are done.

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