How Set up a Local
Web Development Environment

What is a Local Development Environment?

What is a LAMP Stack?

The LAMP stack is a software bundle, comprised of several open-source technologies, that enables programmers to develop web sites and web applications on their computers. Once the applications or web sites are ready, they can be deployed on a production server running the same technologies.

LAMP is an acronym comprised of the four open-source technologies used: L for the Linux Operating system, A for Apache HTTP Web Server, M for either MySQL or MariaDB relational database and P for either PHP or Python (and occasionally Perl) programming languages.

Linux is used as an operating system, upon which the rest of the technologies will be installed and executed. Apache web server is used to serve static or dynamic content to web clients such as web browsers (Chrome, FireFox, etc.). MySQL is used to store, access and manipulate data and PHP is used to create dynamic content that will be served by Apache via the HTTP protocol.

The stack can also be installed on computers running the Windows operating system (in that case it is usually referred to as WAMP) or Mac operating systems (commonly known as MAMP).

Make sure to watch the introductory video by CBT Nuggets below to learn more about the LAMP stack.


You can visit the following websites and install one of the bundles provided by each site:

You can also watch the following videos to guide you through the process of installing and configuring the stack:

Since the video above is quite old (2014), you’ll probably want to download the 64-bit version these days. Also, at this point we are not interested in phpMyAdmin or the Database part of the video nor are we interested in installing WordPress on our machine, so you can just follow the video up to 04:35.



  • Should I choose MySQL or MariaDB for my stack?

As MariaDB is very similar to MySQL database, both technologies can be used interchangeably. For example, popular CMS software such as Drupal, Joomla or WordPress can be configured to run using either of these database solutions.

(Read more about the story behind the MariaDB fork here)



UPDATED: 01.02.2021