How to start web development with XAMPP

 If you are planning to learn web development using  LAMP environment , and find it difficult to set up various component required,  XAMPP  can come to your rescue.   In fact, XAMPP is a prebuilt package with following componets, Apache,MySQL, PHP and Perl.
 You can download the XAMPP package from Apache Friends website. The present release is available for a variety of operating systems.

Installation

   For installation on Ubuntu I downloaded the tar.gz archive from Apache Friends
 I decided to install xampp into /opt . Untar the downloaded file using the following command.

sudo tar -xzvf xampp-linux-1.7.3a.tar.gz -C /opt

Earlier,  the name of XAMPP project was LAMPP . Hence a folder named LAMPP will be created under /opt with all necessary files.

Start/Stop XAMPP
  You  can start XAMPP using the following command from a terminal

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

 Similarly you can stop xampp using

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp stop

Look for any error messages while running the commands.

Using XAMPP to write your web application
 
  Now open up a browser and browse http://127.0.0.1 The following screens will appear .

You can access phpmyadmin from the tools section and work with mysql.

Now you can create a folder named public_html in your home directory.

mkdir ~/public_html

Now you can link this folder to your apache document root as below.

sudo ln -s ~/public_html /opt/lampp/htdocs/$USER

 You can write your HTML/php code using any editor and save it under public_html folder in your home directory. You can test your code by browsing to http://127.0.0.1/yourusername. ( Replace yourusername with your actual user name).

Security issues
  It is not advisable to set up XAMPP to a machine directly connected to internet.   The XAMPP is designed as a beginners platform to learn LAMP. If you want to run a production system look else where for a secure installation of LAMP.