How 2: Installing WordPress on XAMPP Lite for portable development

Yesterday I wrote a tutorial on Installing XAMPP Lite on USB Flash Drive.  Today I’m going to teach you how to install the popular blogging and CMS platform WordPress.  This is possible because XAMPP Lite already includes MySql and PHP.  If you already installed XAMPP Lite, just follow the procedures below and it should be up and running in no time!

 

 

 

Download the latest version of WordPress Here.

Move the content of the WordPress folder(You may need to extract the ZIp first) to xampplitehtdocs.  If you are going to have multiple installs of WordPress it would be a good idea to move all the contents of the WordPress folder to  xampplitehtdocshtdocs where site1 is the name of your site.

Now all of the WordPress files are stored in xampplitehtdocsnameofyoursite on your flash drive.

We now need to setup WordPress on our portable server.  Open your MySql admin page http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ to create a new database for WordPress.  Navigate to Databases on the top menu.  Enter a name for your database in the “Create new database” box, and click Create.

Select your database from the left side, and click privileges on the top.  now select “Add new user”.

Enter a username and password for the database, change the host to “localhost”, make sure “grant all privalges on ‘yourdatabasename'” is selected, and then click the Go button on the bottom of the page.

Your database is now setup, and you should be ready to finish the WordPress install.

Finishing the WordPress Install

Now, in your browser, navigate to your WordPress directory in localhost http://localhost/wordpress_site1/wp-admin/install.php.  (|Note, your wordpress may be in a different folder than wordpress_site1).  Click Create a Configuration File to continue.

Make sure you have your Database name, username, host and password you created previously, and click “Let’s Go!” on the next page.

Enter your WordPress database name, username, and password, leave the other two entries as default, and click Submit.

You should now have the database all ready to go.  Click “Run the install” to finish installing WordPress.

Enter a title, username, and password for your WordPress install, as well as your email address, and then click “Install WordPress”.

All done!  Now you can create and edit pages, posts, themes, and plugins on a USB stick you can take anywhere.

You can view your site by navigating to http://localhost/wordpress_site1/ in your browser.  (Note the /wordpress_site1/  may be different for you, just navigate to where you installed WordPress)

That’s it!!

You now have a working install of XAMPP Lite and WordPress that you can take with you to any Windows computer.  You can test and tweak pages anywhere you go, and its great for showing to clients, no more uploading to a testing or development server.  Hope it’s as much benefit to you as it is to me!