The XAMPP control panel is used to control and monitor the status of services that XAMPP has installed. When the control panel is running, the following icon will be visible in your system tray:
Double-clicking on this icon will bring up the Control Panel.
For ExpressionEngine to be able to install and run, both Apache and MySQL need to be running. If they are not, check the box marked Svc, and click Start to start them as services.
Note
If the Apache service will not start and stay started, verify that you have exited out of Skype and/or ISS.
To take advantage of some features in ExpressionEngine (such as removing the index.php
from ExpressionEngine URLs), we need to use a .htaccess
file, which requires the Apache module mod_rewrite
to be enabled.
1. First, browse to
C:\xampp\apache\conf
in Windows Explorer, and open the filehttpd.conf
in a text editor.2. Do a search for the phase
mod_rewrite
and you should find a line that reads:#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
3. Remove the leading
#
symbol, and save the file. (This uncomments the line in question).
Your .htaccess
files should now be recognized—we will be using them in Chapter 2.
With Apache and MySQL running, we are ready to go.
Now that XAMPP is installed, there is one important folder to note: C:\xampp\htdocs
. This is our web server root. A file placed in this folder will be accessible via our http://localhost/
domain. Right now, this folder contains all the files for the web page shown in the previous screenshot. we can remove or backup these files so that they do not conflict in anyway with ExpressionEngine when we install it.