Once you have XAMPP installed and running on your computer, your browser will be able find your files under localhost. Visit the Hardware and Software report if you need to know more about installing the right tools. Under XAMPP, the default address for localhost is . . .

http://localhost/xampp/splash.php

That link will give you an error if XAMPP is not installed yet.

If you already have XAMPP running on your machine, and then you click on the link above your browser should take you from this web site to the heart of your own computer and you should find yourself looking at something like this . . .

Once that happens, you know you have XAMPP up and running.

The next thing you need to do is keep control of your projects. We do that by keeping each project inside it’s own folder. And periodically, when we have progressed a bit, we copy the files to a newer folder and keep working from there. Then, if anything goes horribly wrong, we can go back to an earlier version of our project and start working (again) from the last known good version.

This is the way that we do simple version control. If you know any devs, they will tell you to use GIT because it’s a bit of software that does version control in a different and more professional way. When you are more advanced, you can try out GIT. For now, we recommend that you use folders for version control. It’s simple and it’s easy to understand.

You will have to keep your projects in the xampp work folder below the htdocs folder below the main xampp folder, because that is where localhost expects to find them!

It’s normal to build and test everything on your own computer first. Then, if you want to, you can upload your web apps to your own web site. Don’t upload all the earlier versions, just upload the one that works! And make sure that the folder structure on your web site follows the pattern that you used on your computer from the xampp work folder downwards.