getting a local wordpress installation

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I spent this evening installing wordpress locally to have an offline playground. I already had an Apache 2.2 web server. So, next I installed MySql 5.1, used the command line tool to create a database (create database wordpress;) and then tried to install WordPress. But there I stumbled across two problems:

First, trying to run the install.php resulted in the following error: "Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress".

But I had properly configured the MySql extension:

  • uncomment the lines “extension=php_mysql.dll” and “extension=php_mysqli.dll” in php.ini
  • configure the correct path to C:\php528\ext (or wherever you installed php) in extension_dir in php.ini
  • copy libmysql.dll to to C:\WINDOWS\system32 (not nice, probably adding the correct path of the DLL location in the PHP directory to the windows PATH variable would work too)

But I still got the error message. The reason was that  php.ini has to be copied to C:\Windows.

Now I could run the install.php and everything installed, but trying to open the blog just gave me a directory listing. It took me some time to find out that the following line has to be modified in httpd.conf:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.shtml
to
DirectoryIndex index.html index.shtml index.php

This tells Apache that index.php is a proper index page. Now I have a local version of the blog for playing around with layout and styles etc. before applying any changes to my online blog.

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One Response to getting a local wordpress installation

  1. Fractioncalc says:

    I am having this problem “Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress” when I’m upgrade the php from version 5.6 to 7.2. Turns out that mysql extension is no longer supported in php version 7.2. It is now using mysqli extention. I am using old version of wordpress which still using mysql extension so the problem existed. So what I did is upgraded the wordpress to the core. I used the latest version of wordpress and used filezilla to put the new version to the site. I only overwrite the folder wp-includes and wp-admin and replace all the files in the root folder with the new files

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