A local server is a server, that is hosted locally on your machine or local computer. With the help of a local server, you can test your website as many times as you want before updating it to the web server. It saves your time as well as it is easy to use.
XAMPP, WAMP, LAMP, and MAMP are all web development environments that allow you to run web servers (such as Apache) and databases (such as MySQL) locally on your computer. They are essentially collections of software programs that are bundled together to make it easier for developers to set up a local web server for testing and development purposes.
XAMPP, WAMP, LAMP, and MAMP are local servers that are mainly used while developing PHP websites. This software is mainly used to test the website locally. With these local servers, the programmers can test their website locally, before uploading it to the main server. By testing locally, we can find out the errors and bugs before uploading.
Here are the key differences between XAMPP, WAMP, LAMP, and MAMP:
XAMPP
- XAMPP stands for "Cross-Platform, Apache, MariaDB(MySQL), PHP, and Perl."
- It is a free and open-source web development environment that runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
- XAMPP includes Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl, as well as other tools such as PhpMyAdmin and Mercury Mail Server.
XAMPP is one of the simplest and most lightweight local servers that is used to test your website locally. It is an open-source platform. This includes X-OS because it works in all major operating systems like Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. It includes features like Filezilla, mercury mail, supporting Perl, and much more. One of the main advantages is that you can perform as much testing and update the content in your website testing locally. Since it is open-source, you can easily download and install it in your system. You can perform several testing installing it once.
WAMP
- WAMP stands for "Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP."
- It is a web development environment that runs on Windows.
- WAMP includes Apache, MySQL, and PHP, as well as other tools such as PHPMyAdmin.
WAMP server works only on Windows operating system. It is an open-source platform and uses the Apache webserver. It also uses the MySQL relational database management system and PHP object-oriented scripting language. The important part of WAMP is Apache which is used to run a web server on windows.
LAMP
- LAMP stands for "Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP."
- It is a web development environment that runs on Linux.
- LAMP includes Apache, MySQL, and PHP, as well as other tools such as PHPMyAdmin.
LAMP is an open-source platform and works on the Linux operating system. It uses an Apache web server, MySQL relational database management system, and PHP object-oriented scripting language. Since this platform has four layers, it can also be called a LAMP stack. It is highly secure working with Linux OS. The LAMP is easy to code with PHP. It is a cheap and ubiquitous hosting platform. Instead of only serving static HTML pages, a LAMP server can generate dynamic web pages that run PHP code and load data from a MySQL database.
MAMP
- MAMP stands for "Mac, Apache, MySQL, and PHP."
- It is a web development environment that runs on macOS.
- MAMP includes Apache, MySQL, and PHP, as well as other tools such as PHPMyAdmin.
MAMP is an open-source platform and it works on Mac operating system. As the above local server, MAMP uses Apache web server, Mysql relational database management system, and PHP object-oriented language. It gives you all the tools that you run WordPress on your machine, for development and testing. You can install this on Mac or Windows-based PC.
Overall, XAMPP, WAMP, LAMP, and MAMP are all similar in that they provide a local web server environment for testing and development purposes. The main difference between them is the operating system they run on (Windows, Linux, macOS).
