Well yes you can run it locally but to make WordPress available to the whole wide world, you will *want* hosting! If, for nothing else, the security aspect. Making your local machine available to the internet is a very brave but foolhardy thing to do in today’s security environment. If you were to run your server yourself and host your own sites, you’d also be responsible for keeping your server environment up to date and patched. Then there’s the bandwidth factor. Most users are not hooked up to internet backbones like most ISP providers. So trying to run a server with an active website on a standard home internet connection will likely get a nice, but forceful letter from your ISP that you will need to upgrade to a business account and/or pay considerably more so they can continue to provide service.
All that doom and gloom (and reality checks) aside, yes you can run your own server and host your own WordPRess site on it and make it available to the internet. It’s just not easy.
And yes it’s true that there’s no technical knowledge needed to use WordPres (I mean its the same as logging into any other website and filling in a form and hitting “submit”) but that’s completely different then the technical knowledge you do *need* to set up and configure a WordPress site from scratch.
So if I haven’t scared you off yet let’s start at setting up WordPress on a local development server.
I suggest using WAMP or MAMP – pre-configured server stacks that you can install on your local machine to run Apache server, MySQL database and PHP server-side scripting on a Windows or Mac environment.
Once you have WAMp/MAMP installed, test it out by turning it on and pointing your browser to localhost:8888/
The ‘:8888’ is the port number and this is the way WAMP/MAMP keep your sites local instead of sharing it to the whole wide world (if your other network gear is configured for it at least). You should see some default web page that WAMP or MAMP provide.
So now we know our server environment works. Let’s set up a database for our WordPress site to use. WAMP/MAMP usually comes with an application called PHPMyAdmin. Point your browser to it (it’s a web app made with PHP scripts that allow you to interact with the MySQL database). First, let’s create a new database. Give it a name. Then create a new database user, give it a password, and set this users role to be able to only read/write/view the new database you created. Now we have a database and a specific user to use it.
Now download wordpress, unzip it, and move the folder to your WAMP/MAMP htdocs folder.
Open up the wp-config-sample.php file with a text editor or code editor and read through it. You’ll notice it’s fairly well documented. So now we’ll insert our database information, with the database name, database username and database user password. This is what WordPress will use to access the database. Then fill in the other options as desired (read through http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php to see all the options).
Then save this edited document as wp-config.php.
Point your browser at localhost:8888/name-of-wordpress-folder/
You’ll be greeted with the WordPress installation screen. Fill in the forms and click save. You can then log into your new wordpress site using the username and password you set up on the WordPress installation screen.
And there you have it, a locally running WordPress site.
