Drupal 8 installation on Windows 10 using Xampp

This was done as a task for the annual competition call Google code in. This is a competition which pre-university students ages 13 to 17 are invited to take part in Google Code-in, our contest introducing young minds to the world of open source. With a wide variety of bite-sized tasks, it’s easy for beginners to jump in and get started no matter what skills you have. Mentors from our participating organizations are available to lend a helping hand as you learn what it’s like to work on an open source project.

This post aid to teach how to install Drupal 8.23 on Windows 10 using Xampp 5.6.28 . All The steps will be highlighted below also with the errors with the fixes which one may face.

Steps:

1. To start off with the installation download the latest drupal 8 software and the latest xampp software. For this drupal installation we will be using xampp as our server. After they have both  downloaded install the xampp to your local computer and extract the drupal 8 zip file.
2. Open xampp and start both apache and mysql. Before you can setup your database for your drupal site you will need to configure the server that it work well with drupal. To do so for apache click config then php.ini. Inside that file you may need to enable the php_fileinfo.dll extension, to enable it you may search for it and remove the semicolon from the beginning where you would see (extension=php_fileinfo.dll).

3. Now you will need to change the password for you root user in your database for security purposes. To do so select the admin button, this will carry you to your web browser on a mysql page, this will be where you control database. On that page select "user account" , then press "edit privileges" for the root user at localhost.

After It will send you to a page with the privileges and at the top there is change password , select it and change your password to anything you like.

4. The database which you will be using in your site can be created now. Go to "databases" and in the edit field where create database is write the name you would like your database to have.

. Also for that database you will need a separate user, so go to "user account" and select add user account. Fill in the necessary data and the Host as local ,  for the privileges give it all data and structure privileges and for administrative privilege 'grant'. When you are done press done at the bottom of page.

5. Finally to begin the drupal installation  rename the drupal 8 folder to anything you like which you had extracted. Transfer that folder to the htdocs folder inside of 'xampp' folder, if you installed xampp to

the default location you could find it in the C:// directory at C://xamp/.

6. To now start the install wizard inside your browser type "localhost/(drupal folder name)".

Press save and continue. If you got an error which state to enable opcode caching cancel the installation.

To fix the error go to the xampp control panel then to php.ini file  found in the configuration for the apache server.Now inside the file search for opcache and below dba as showed in the picture below add this line of code (zend_extension=php_opcache.dll). Save the file and restart the server.

Return to your browser and restart the installation select save and continue until you reach set up database.

At this page enter the database name which you created before , the username and the password for that user, when done press save and continue. Finally it would bring you to the configuration page four your site, The information which you would place here is for the site like the username and password ect. When your are done press save and continue.

7. Congratulation you have setup up your drupal 8 site, you are finish and now can add your content and customize your site to your judgement.