XAMPP is a free, cross-platform web server, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages.

Etymology

XAMPP's name is an acronym for:

X (which signifies X, meaning any of the four operating systems below)

Apache

MySQL

PHP

Perl

The program is released under the GNU General Public License and acts as a free, easy-to-use web server capable of serving dynamic pages. Currently, XAMPP is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris and Mac OS X, and it is mainly used for web development projects.

Requirements and features

XAMPP only requires one zip, tar or exe file to be downloaded and run, and very little configuration of the various components that make up the web server is required. XAMPP is regularly updated to incorporate the latest releases of Apache/MySQL/PHP and Perl. It also comes with a number of other modules, including OpenSSL and phpMyAdmin.

Because its user interface is considered simple to use, it is sometimes called the "lazy man's WAMP/LAMP installation."

Installing XAMPP takes less time than installing every installation contained in the package as a separate install.

The result is self-contained, multiple instances can exist on a computer, and a given instance can be copied from one computer to another.

It is offered in both a full, standard version; and a smaller version (known as XAMPP Lite). Add-on extension modules are also available.

Applications

Officially, XAMPP's designers only intended it for use as a development tool, to allow website designers and programmers to test their work on their own computers without any access to the Internet. To make this as easy as possible, many important security features are disabled by default. In practice, however, XAMPP is sometimes used to actually serve web pages on the World Wide Web . A special tool is provided to password-protect the most important parts of the package. XAMPP also provides support for creating and manipulating databases in MySQL and SQLite among others.