If you want to run PHP applications on a Windows machine you need Apache, MySQL and PHP. Downloading and configuring the three separate components can be time consuming, however there are some alternatives. Jon Lee Web Development recommends XAMPP
a small application that bundles the programs together for convenience.
I have not used XAMPP, instead using Easy PHP, a very similar package to XAMPP. Easy
PHP comes with a Windows installer which takes only a few minutes to install. Once installed you can access a simple console to start and stop Apache and MySQL:
Within the directory Easy PHP installs to is a sub directory titled “WWW”, within this directory you can unpack your test applications (blogs, CMS, E-Commerce etc).
Navigate to “http://localhost/yourApplication” and run the installation script as you would on a web-server.
Before doing this you will need to create a database and database user, for that you should use the MySQL Administrator, on which I will write a separate post.