This is an article on how to set up Apache 2.2.3 PHP 5.1.4 and MySQL 5.0.24a on a WindowsXP machine in plain and simple steps.

Apache is an open-source enterprise grade http server daemon. It is used by many of the largest websites on the internet. In this tutorial we will go through the initial setup of Apache webserver for Windows, PHP 5 and MySQL 5. With this you should be able to use most any dynamic content management systems, or bulletin board services.

First off we need to setup apache. We will use the zip file provided by apachelounge.com, as it is proven to be faster than the version that apache.org offers. You will need these files.

Apache 2.2.3 SSL (4.7 mb)

Microsoft VC++ Redistributable (2.6mb)

Allrighty, after you have both of those files, you will need to run the vcredist_x86.exe, and let that install. Then you need to extract the httpd-2.2.3-win32-x86-ssl.zip. Lets create a directory in the C: drive called web. We will do all of our extracting to that folder for the most part. Then extract the Apache2 folder inside the zip file to c:\web. This might take a bit because there is an entire copy of the manual in this zip file with a lot of individual html files. After that is done we will need to edit the httpd.conf in the folder c:\web\apache2\conf. So open httpd.conf in a text editor of some sort. I'll refer to individual lines of the file. If you would like a better text editor than notepad or wordpad for this download Textpad. On line 31 we need to change the MaxRequestsPerChild the default is 0, which is unlimited.

This is rather inefficient because after time the child process will continually eat up ram and never release it. So if we set this to say 2000, the child will serve 2000 requests, die, release the ram it was using and the parent server wills start another child process. The next thing we need to change is the ServerRoot. This is located at line 42. At this point in time I would like to explain that with Apache for windows whenever you enter a directory you need to use foreward slashes (/) instead of the common backslash (\). Also do not use the trailing slash so c:/blah is accecptable while c:/blah/ is not. So this is what we have:

We need to change this to "c:/web/apache2. While not necessary you may want to change the port on which apache listens. This is useful if you want to run more than one webserver, or if your ISP blocks port 80. This is on line 53. It looks like this:

By default Apache listens on port 80. You can change this to whatever you wish. On the next page we will setup the main server configuration section of apache.