Servers on Your Desktop

Many people think a technology server is an entirely separate machine or in modern cases, a web based addition to their home technology. While servers typically play a certain role for technology use, their operating functionality is actually quite basic in comparison to the average person's desktop (or laptop) computer; even the average smart phone processes more than many server machines do.

In regards to such, I wanted to touch on the basic installation of a web server stack on the average desktop environment. On a Windows machine I use XAMP for installing the basic necessities required to run a small web server with the functionality required for a development instance of Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. On a Linux (or similar) machine, this stack might be referred to as a LAMP stack. The package "stack" is most typically comprised of Apache, MySQL and PHP packages which are used on most web servers for a variety of functionalities associated with websites providing a variety of user functionality.

Why install these things on my home use desktop or laptop? Well, many years ago when I was learning how to create websites of various types and for a variety of reasons, I found it best to do my editing and development in an "offline" setting rather than doing things "live" where nobody would notice the changes that were happening in the process while I was making them. Also, the website would stay live so people could visit without taking the site down for service. This "offline" work style is effective even with applications such as Wordpress once a person has learned how to copy over any writings into the MySQL tables.

Essentially, all changes, modifications or updates are done at the convenience of the admin then verified through the localhost (127.0.0.1) web address which gives a sudo-live representation of how the site changes will look before copying the files to the live server for the world to see. The packages to do this aren't very large but the benefit is. Whether doing one's own production or providing services for someone else, work can be checked and verified before being sent live to the operating site.

I should also note that the XAMP admin panel makes those services easy to turn on and off so they are not needlessly burdening our memory or processor when we don't need them to be.