This tutorial is for XAMPP 1.7.3 running under Windows XP with Service Pack 3. It may be similar for other version combinations, but no guarantee is made.

Assumes you have installed XAMPP. Instructions can be found here.

Installing XAMPP allows you to develop, test, and play around with web server code on your local machine. You can configure and test out your website locally, instead of live somewhere on the web.

It does have the drawback that to access your website you have to type localhost/my-web-site, where my-web-site is actually the directory you installed your website in.

You can setup the Apache Server in XAMPP to serve up web pages as though they were actually located on www.my-web-site.com instead of localhost.

This is a two step process: first, you have to redirect the web site name to your computer; next, you get Apache to redirect the web site address to your installed directory.

Redirecting the Web Site to Your Computer

1) Locate your hosts file. In Windows XP, this file is located in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc:

2) Open the file with a plain text editor (like Notepad++). Using a word processor, like Word, can mess up the file when you save it.

It is very likely that the file is empty, except for the default comment and examples (the section in the green box):

3) Add lines containing the domain name(s) and IP address to redirect to. See the section in the red box in the image above.

• Each line must begin with the address 127.0.0.1 (this is the localhost address)

• After the IP address, type the name of the domain you wish to redirect to this address. You may only enter 1 name per line.

• Addresses like my-site.com and www.my-site.com are different and each need a separate line.

4) Save the changes.

5) Restart your browser (if it was open when you made the change to your hosts file).

Getting Apache to Serve Your Web Site

6) Locate the httpd-vhosts.conf file. For most XAMPP 1.7.3 installs this will be C:\xampp\apache\conf\extra (in my case, I installed XAMPP on my D-drive, so the folder is D:\xampp\apache\conf\extra):

7) Open the file using a plain text editor (like Notepad++). Using a Word processor, like Word, can mess up the file when you save:

The file will contain some documentation and sample virtual hosts.

8) Add, at the bottom of the file, new virtual hosts for each domain you added in step 3) above.

Each host will have the following form:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.joomla.16
    ServerAlias joomla.16
    DocumentRoot d:/xampp/htdocs/joomla16
</VirtualHost>

ServerName: following this label, add the name of the domain you added in step 3)

ServerAlias: following this label, you may add as many alternate domains (separated by spaces) as you like that are supposed to resolve to this virtual host. Remember that www.my-domain.com is different from my-domain.com, but, typically, you would want them to resolve to the same server.

DocumentRoot: following this label, add the path where your website is located. You can use an absolute path (as in the example above), or a relative path (but relative paths can be trickier to set up, so I prefer to use an absolute path).

9) Save the file.

10) Restart the Apache Server to have the change take effect. Do this by clicking on the Stop button on the XAMPP control panel and then clicking on the Start button. (You could also just reboot the computer, but that is overkill).

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