Posted on August 18, 2009 by ProProxier

Your proxy site is typically running on a web server provided by a hosting company. However, before you purchase any hosting plan, your first job is to install a local test environment.

What is a Local Test Environment

Basically, it is a mini web server installed on your computer, which allows you to run and test your proxy site locally. It brings many benefits such as:

• Create a web proxy site without deploying it to the remote server.
• Freely experiment proxy settings, page designs, or site cutomizations.
• Test any changes before moving them to the production site.
• Make a backup of your live proxy sites.
• Quickly build a new web proxy site by duplicating an existing one.

Install Local Test Environment Using XAMPP

Most of popluar free proxy scripts are written in PHP or Perl and running on Apache web server. In old days, it was hard to do the server installation and configuration. Fortunately, you can now download some pre-configured Apache distributions, such as XAMPP, or MAMP. By using them, you can have your local test environment ready within 10 minutes.

As an example, we use XAMPP in this post. You can download XAMPP here.

The following video tutorial will show you how to use XAMPP to install local test environment for your web proxy site.

In the next post, we will take about how to Download and Install a Free Proxy Script.

This post belongs to the How to Create Your Own Web Proxy Site series which helps beginners to build their first web proxy. Read the introduction page here.

To find out more about proxy business, especially about how to become a Pro Proxier and make money,  you can sign up for my newsletter here.