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Understanding XAMPP Control Panel
The XAMPP control panel gives you complete control over all installed XAMPP components. You can use the CP to start/stop different modules, launch the Unix shell, open Windows explorer and see all operations running in the background.

Here is a quick overview of the Control Panel. For now, you only need to know how to start and stop an Apache server.




Testing Your XAMPP Installation
Follow these steps to test your XAMPP installation by launching the Apache web server and creating a simple PHP file.

Step 1: In the XAMPP control panel, click on ‘Start’ under ‘Actions’ for the Apache module. This instructs XAMPP to start the Apache webserver.

Step 2: Open your web browser and type in: http://localhost or 127.0.0.1

Step 3: Select your language from the splash screen.



Step 4: You should see the following screen. This means you’ve successfully installed XAMPP on your computer.



Step 5: We will now test whether XAMPP has installed PHP successfully. To do this, fire up Notepad and type the following into a new document:

$mad= 'Welcome to MaDLeeTs';
echo $mad

?>

Save this file as ‘madleets.php’ in c:\xampp\htdocs\ .

Step 6: Navigate to localhost/madleets.php. You should see the “Welcome to MaDLeeTs” message:




Congratulations! You have now successfully installed XAMPP and even written your very first PHP program. You can now use your local Apache webserver to create and test complex PHP web apps, fiddle around with MySQL and even learn how actual web servers work with Tomcat, FileZilla, OpenSSL, and more.