Appendix A. Setting up a Local Development Environment

In order to test our Drupal installation before putting it online, we need to set up a local development environment, which needs to include:

• A web server; for example, Apache

  • The Apache rewrite module

• PHP

  • The GD image manipulation library

• A database server; for example, MySQL

Let's look at installing WampServer to get a local development environment running on a Windows computer, the commands to install Apache, PHP, and MySQL on Linux (a LAMP setup), and where to download and how to install MAMP for a Mac.