Introduction

Once you have downloaded and installed XAMPP on your machine, we can start using the XAMPP Control Panel. On Windows by default XAMPP would be installed on your computers’ C Drive. We can specify a different directory during the installation process.

How to Launch?

You can start the XAMPP Control panel either by launching the system tray icon or from the Start menu as shown below:

XAMPP Control Panel

Once you start the control panel, you start using it to start, configure, and view logs as shown in the picture.

Using the control panel you can start different services like Apache, Tomcat, MySQL database etc.

Click on the start button for the Apache server module. You can verify that the server started by looking at the logs or visiting the below URL:

http://localhost/dashboard/

XAMPP Control Panel reflects the server status to check as shown above.

Heads up

XAMPP is meant only for development purposes. It has certain configuration settings that make it easy to develop locally but that are insecure if you want to have your installation accessible to others. If you want to have your XAMPP accessible from the internet, make sure you understand the implications. Alternatively, you can use  LAMP or other stacks which are similar packages that are more suitable for production.