With the abundance of communication between the browser and a server in these days of AJAX and JSON data interchange, there has never been a better time to get your own development web server set up so that you can test all those dynamic scripts you’re writing. This article will show you how to do it using some of the most popular software.
Now we need to configure PHP to use MySQL. Reopen php.ini in your text editor and find the Dynamic Extensions section (line 628). There should be a list of the different extensions currently in the ext folder. Find the line that reads ;extension=php_mysql.dll and remove the semi-colon from the start of the line. Save the file and restart your computer.
The output of the phpinfo() file will tell us whether PHP can see MySQL; just open up phpinfo.html in your browser again (requesting it properly from the server) and use "find on this page" to search for MySQL. You should see something like this:
To really test it we can create a file that will attempt to read data from the table we created earlier. In a blank page in your text editor add the following code:
<?php
mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "yourMySQLpassword") or die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db("test") or die(mysql_error());
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM people") or die(mysql_error());
Save this as mysqltest.php in the apache site folder and request the file from the server. The results should be something like the following page:
If you see the page correctly then everything works together as it should and everything is done. You can now enjoy the benefits of having your very own development web server. You should note however that this basic installation has not covered any security or optimization configuring, so you should absolutely not use this guide as a method to set up a live, publicly accessible web server.
Apache 
