I was viewing a video where the speaker recommends installing Microsoft Web Platform which is basically a bundle of IIS, SQL Server, and some other components if you want to run a local web server for testing and development of web sites.
This idea didn’t appeal to me for a couple of reasons. One is that none of the components are Open Source. Another is that most hosting sites aren’t using them either – they are running LAMP and/or other Open Source components.
But it made me wonder if there exists something like the Microsoft Web Platform bundle for running LAMP – on a Windows system. On a Linux system it would be trivial to set them all up, as easy as apt-get install php apache mysql or something similar.
There is something I found today: it is called WampServer and is basically Apache, PHP, and MySQL bundled together which installs with one installer. One cool thing it does beyond making installing and managing all these components easy is install a useful tray icon where you can manage the components.
One caveat: If you have Skype running, it will actually use port 80 and prevent WAMP’s Apache component from starting, so you will need to stop Skype, run the WAMP Apache service, then restart Skype (it will automatically use another port). Skype has an option under its Settings – Advanced -> “Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections” which is on by default.
WampServer is not the only option. Similar projects include:
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