How to Install cURL and EasyPHP

By Brad Malloy

The EasyPHP website and app development environment runs on any Windows PC with no setup at all. The powerful cURL command line tool retrieves resources of almost any type from network addresses. Install and use the two together to create a full development and testing environment for Web applications that use PHP, Apache and MySQL.

EasyPHP

Step 1

Download the most recent EasyPHP installation. EasyPHP is available for Microsoft Windows exclusively.

Step 2

Install EasyPHP using the setup program you just downloaded. During installation, EasyPHP creates a subfolder inside the installation folder called "www." This is where your Web files will go, exactly the same as a "public_html" folder on a Web server.

Step 3

Run the EasyPHP program. This starts up the various components of the Web server, including Apache and the MySQL database.

cURL

Step 1

Download cURL for your operating system. If you're unsure of which files you need, click the cURL Download Wizard link. At the first screen, select curl executable to find installation programs.

Step 2

Extract the ZIP archive that you downloaded to the C:\Windows\system32 folder. cURL runs from a command line, as it does not have a user interface, and "system32" is the folder where your computer looks to find basic commands. By placing cURL there, you can skip having to navigate to a special directory every time you want to use it.

Step 3

Press the Windows-R keys, then type cmd at the prompt and click the OK button. From this command line, run cURL by typing curl your-options your-address where "your-address" is the address of the resource you would like to access, and "your-options" contains the output file, if you would like one.

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