Can PHP be installed on a local machine?

Question

For Web-dev, can the PHP Processor be installed on a regular Windows XP machine, such that viewing PHP files through a browser executes the PHP script? (NOT Windows Serv

Answer 1

You can, as already mentioned, go about it the easier way by installing something like XAMPP (my personal favorite) or, if you want to mimic something closer to a server environment, install VirtualBox/VirtualPC and create a virtual machine running Debian or whatever server OS you need, with the appropriate PHP, Apache2 (etc...) packages.

I find this to be sometimes preferable to using XAMPP, since XAMPP comes packaged with a specific set of Apache or PHP modules and you may need something not already pre-packaged with XAMPP.