Created two months ago, the WordPress.org support forums has added a new section specifically for those that install and or use WordPress on a localhost. Installing WordPress onto a PC or Mac that can be used locally without an internet connection can at times become quite the endeavor. Thankfully, there are software suites such as WAMPServer and XAMPP that make the process of installing all of the necessary software to turn a machine into a web server very easy.
The following link has an assortment of community created tutorials for various setups to install WordPress on your local machine. There are also a number of links published within the WordPress Installation Techniques Codex Article.
About time there’s a forum category for this. It was cryptic to figure out where it should go before, now it’s clear.
Good job for the moderators and team recognizing that.
We use local installs all the time before rolling out to dev/live sites.
One of the hurdles people encounter along the way is how to access the localhost site from the Internet. We recently ran an article about it http://managewp.com/how-to-access-a-local-website-from-internet-with-port-forwarding and I hope this will help some folks.
After encountering a brick wall with localhosting for a decade, I was easily able to get WAMPserver working, a couple-few years back. I am preparing to move to XAMPP now. I have not been using a remote host since I got the local going (and I have fantasies of doing ‘lite’ hosting, from my desktop (see Vladimir Prevolac above)).
‘Course, I also have Ubuntu (under Windows) since v9.6, and have installed LAMP on it both piecemeal and using their ‘meta-package’ install. (there is also the separate “Ubuntu Server” distro which one can download, instead of standard Ubuntu; I am going to try this on a USB stick).
I believe there are also localhost packages like we use on Windows, for Ubuntu/Linux. I skipped over these and went straight for the full server environment, since it seemed easy enough. I am reconsidering and will be taking a good look at Ubuntu localhost options.