Documenting my XAMPP for Windows setup for myself and anyone else who finds it useful. For those of you that do not know, XAMPP is a completely free, easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP, and Perl. I still have my Virtual Machine for LAMP Development which I will use for test deployments of my localhost LAMP development prior to production deployment. This local XAMPP setup will be better for debugging, working with node modules and grunt tasks for preparing the deployment build.

This blog post addresses a common scenario — a local LAMP development environment on your Windows or OS X computer. You could use XAMPP on either Windows or OS X, MAMP on OS X or native Apache in OS X. Here, we will create a Linux virtual machine with Samba configured to share the Virtual Machine file system with the host computer. We will also create virtual hosts, install and configure WordPress and Xdebug.

OPERATING SYSTEM: Linux Mint 13 Maya For Drupal development, since I already have a Linux Mint system setup, I decide to focus on it rather than the Windows 8 Acquia Drupal setup I blogged about a few days ago. Apache, MySQL & PHP Install all of these applications with a single command. Thanks to Unix System Engineer, Nitin Sookun for posting this on the Linux Mint Community website. Since you will need root permissions when performing write operations outisde of your home directory, the commands shown below presume that you are logged in as root or are in a root instance of the terminal.