Hi, I really hope you are doing well. When we want to program web applications, it is essential to have a web development environment. At present, the most used tools are Apache, PHP, and MySQL Database. So, we need to install it one per one, and sometimes this is a really complex work. As a matter of fact, here you can see our article about how to install Apache on Windows Server 2019. But, today I will talk to you about a software specially designed to make our development work very much easy. It is about WampServer, which is a free software under GPML license, that allows us to create web applications with Apache2, PHP and a MySQL database. In other words, this tool automatizes all the process of desired software installation, besides provide a complete menu to management all the services. So, let´s go for it.
Installing WampServer
The first thing to do is go to the official site and download the last executable file.
Click on the download section and select download direct.
Once the file has been downloaded, double-click on it by running as administrator, to start the installation process by selecting the language to use during the installation.
Next, we need to accept the license agreement
Then, a window with very important information relative to the installation will show up. Here we can see the necessary software prerequisites (Visual Studio C++). About this item, we will refer more longly in the troubleshooting paragraph.
Select the destination folder to installation
Choose the destination of shortcut
Once we had choose the options, setup is ready to start the installation
Just wait while the setup is extracting and installing files.
We have to select predetermined browser to run WampServer
Select the text editor (Notepad)
The setup is very intuitive and helpful, it shows some explanations before first use
Click on finish to close the setup
Testing WampServer
Now we can start to use WampServer by double-clicking on direct access. After that, we will see the WampServer icon in the lower right corner of the screen. At first, it will be red (none of the services are running), then it will turn orange (some of the services are running) or it will turn green (all the services are running).
Next, if we want to test to see that everything was installed correctly we go to the WAMP management console and click on Localhost or just type http://localhost.
Solving some installation issues.
At the beginning of the article, I told you about very important information offered by the setup installer. This is related to the prerequisite of installing Visual Studio C ++. The first thing to remember is that we must install all versions of this software, and not only the most recent. With this intention, Wampserver staff give us two helpful tools: The first one is a tool that shows us which of the C ++ packages we need to run the server correctly. The other is the possibility of downloading the entire archive package compressed into one, in its 32 and 64-bit versions. This is of vital importance since if we use a 64-bit computer, we must install the versions for 64 and 32 bits too. Both can be downloaded from here.
It is important to note that the installation of this software must be done before installing wampserver, because otherwise there is a risk that the process will throw the following error message
Solving post installation problems
As already mentioned, when starting the service an icon will indicate the status of the service, it is likely that it will remain in orange and never turn green, indicating that some of the services are stopped.In this case, the most obvious solution is to click on the console and restart all services.
If the problem persists, we must find out which of the services is stopped. In this opportunity, the service that is not running is MariaDB
Most of the time, this problem is caused by the ports. If they are busy or fail to connect then the service will not start. To verify this situation, we will proceed to test the port used by the service, in my case 3306.
As can be seen in the test result, port 3306 is being occupied by the MySQL application. And for that reason, the MariaDB service cannot start. The solution is to assign another free port (3308) so that the service can connect and therefore start. It only remains to wait while the changes are made and all the services will be running
Well, this has been everything for now. The process of installing WampServer is relatively simple, but if you don’t pay attention to the prerequisites, it can complicate our work. On the other hand, it is convenient to check the ports assigned to each service, so that there is no conflict between them and they can start.
