Why would you want to setup a local development environment? Many reasons, especially if your a developer/programmer. It simplifies and improves development as you can develop and test everything locally before uploading to a live/production web server.

Local development allows you to do a more fine-grained debugging of your code as any errors or debug information can only be seen by you, you don't have to worry about it being exposed to anyone on a live/production server.

Setup

Before we jump right into setting up the environment, there are a few things we need to go over first, as you have a few different choices in software that will create this environment.

The software you choose will depend on your PC platform - Linux/Unix, Mac, or Windows.

• For Windows, you have XAMPP, WAMP, and EasyPHP
• For Mac, you have MAMP and XAMPP
• and for Linux/Unix, there is LAMPP (linux version of XAMPP), or you can install PHP etc from source.

If you're on a Windows I suggest XAMPP, and for Linux I suggest LAMPP. They are rather easy to install and have a lot integrated into the development environment