2.2 Installing WordPress Locally

Welcome to lesson two of this course, where you'll learn how to install WordPress. Now, you can work with WordPress in two different ways. Number one, on a live server, which means any changes you make will be visible immediately to everyone who's visiting your website. Or number two, you can work locally on your computer, which means that any changes you make are only visible there, on your computer locally, okay? And this allows you to test and develop your website, your WordPress project, as much as you want before sending it to a live server or publishing it. In this lesson you're going to learn how to work locally with WordPress, and also what kind of software you need. Let's begin. So before we get into the software part, I wanna quickly explain how WordPress works. So WordPress, as I said, is a piece of software, right? But it has certain requirements in order to run properly. And one of those requirements is a web server, okay? Or a web server software. A web server software is Apache, that's one of them. NGINX, I believe, is the second one. There are a couple more, but these two are very popular, especially Apache. And Apache is, of course, free software. Now, what WordPress also needs is support for PHP and also a database management system. And that can be MySQL, it can be MariaDB, there are a couple others as well. Apache supports both of these, so it supports PHP, among other things. And PHP is a programming language, in which WordPress is written. And it also supports MySQL, which is this database management system. And with it you can basically create databases that WordPress then uses to store information about your website. So, the very first step in working with WordPress locally is to use a software that can emulate a web server on your local machine. Now, there are a couple of options here. One of the most popular one, and the one that we're gonna use in this course, is called MAMP. And it also has a pro version, which is paid and it offers some extra features. But for this demonstration, the free version is more than enough. So as you can see here, MAMP is a free local server environment that works on macOS and Windows. Another alternative would be XAMPP. This is a more cross-platform option because it works on Windows, macOS and Linux. So depending on your operating system you can go and install either of these, they work just as well. As I was saying, we're gonna be using MAMP. So I have MAMP installed, I have the free version right here, and if you're using macOS, this is kind of what you'll see. Right here you'll see some status LEDs telling me, hey, the Apache server is up and running, the MySQL server is up and running. So what you need to do next is create a database. So go to Open WebStart page, and that's gonna take you to your MAMP configuration. From here you have the ability to open up the MAMP directory, which we'll do later, and you can also access some tools. So what we need here is PHPMYADMIN, let's open that in a new window. And here you'll see all of the databases that are currently created. For this installation, we're gonna create a new database. So we're gonna go to Databases, and where it says Create database we're gonna give it a database name. Let's call it wp-demo-tuts. And we're gonna hit Create. So right now we have a new database, wp-demo-tuts, created right here. That's all you need to do here, you don't have to worry about the structure because WordPress will automatically populate this database for you. All right, that's step one. Step two is to download WordPress. So go to wordpress.org, click Get WordPress. Download WordPress, and the version that's currently available at the time of this recording is 5.2.2. So I say, Download. Let's save it, and I have that right here in my Downloads folder, where it says wordpress-5.2.2. I'm just gonna extract this archive, right? So now what you need to do is take this, copy it, and go to your MAMP folder. By default it's gonna be called htdocs, I believe. However, I have a custom configuration here. Let me just show you. If I open up the preferences here, and I go to Web Server, you can see that my document root is actually adi > Desktop > MAMP. You can put this in any folder you want really, it doesn't really matter. Okay, so going to the folder where you have your MAMP root, and I'm gonna paste in that WordPress folder. You can rename this, if you want. I'm gonna call it wp-demo-tuts, just like our database. You don't have to do that, by the way. The fact that it has the same name as the database is irrelevant, this can be any name that you want. All right, so now what we need to do is, we're gonna need to go back to our MAMP starting website. If you closed that, no problem, simply open up your MAMP app again and you'll see an Open WebStart page, and it's gonna take you right here. And you just click My Website, and this will get you to the root which is localhost:8888, which is the default port this runs on. And from here, we're gonna choose wp-demo-tuts. Don't worry about wp-latest, that's another WordPress installation I have. We're not gonna play with that. So, wp-demo-tuts, And this is gonna open up the setup wizard for WordPress. Choose the language, hit Continue. This is gonna tell you that before you proceed, you need to know a couple of things from here. It gives you a list. We're gonna hit Let's go. Database name, this is where we put in this name right here. They need to match, so wp-demo-tuts. Username is gonna be root, password is gonna be root. Database host, we'll keep it at localhost. Table prefix, this is not that important, it just adds this wp_ to the name of each table that's gonna be created in the database. You can change this if you want, I'm gonna leave it just like that. So hit Submit, run the installation. We're gonna give it a site title, we're gonna say WordPress Demo Tuts. Username, let's say admin. And the password, just so we can remember it, we're gonna say password. And by the way, you shouldn't do this. You shouldn't put password as your actual password, but I think we'll get away with it for this demo. I'm gonna enter my email address here, and we're gonna disable the search engine indexing. By the way, this is a option that you should leave unchecked on a live website. But since we're working locally, we can go ahead and check that. So with all of this in, let's install WordPress. And it has been installed. Nice, let's log in. Admin and password, And now we're in. We now have a fully working installation of WordPress, and if we wanna see the front end, or our actual website, we can simply hover this, click it, or click Visit Site. And there we go, we now have WordPress installed locally. Now, what about on a live server? We'll cover that in the next lesson. There, you'll learn how a live server is different from your local machine, and also the steps you need to take to publish your website with WordPress. See you there.