How to Install and Setup Magento on a Windows 7 Machine

This tutorial will try to install and setup magento on a local pc running windows 7.

 Requirements (I'm using the following versions, you can search the download links using google - lame :-) ):
1.) apache2.2
2.) php-5.2.14
3.) MySQL Server 5.5
4.) magento-1.6.1.0

 Steps
1.) After successful installation of items 1-3, extract magento on any directory that you want.

 2.) Create a virtual directory for the new magento installation, by modifying the httpd.conf file (search for <Directory> section):

<Directory "C:/your_path/magento-1.6.1.0">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Modify the alias section: <IfModule alias_module> Alias /magento6 C:/your_path/magento-1.6.1.0

 3.) I enable url rewriting so I uncomment the following line in httpd.conf: LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

 4.) Since we are on windows we need to activate htaccess for url rewriting, so let's create a file where you unzipped magento: C:/your_path/magento-1.6.1.0. It should contain the ff: htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_php5.c>
 php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off
 php_flag short_open_tag on
</IfModule>

DirectoryIndex index.php

#RewriteEngine on
#RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|media|skin|js|downloader|robots\.txt)
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /magento6/index.php/$1 [L]
#RewriteBase /

To let apache know that we have a configuration file add: AccessFileName htaccess.txt, below the FilesMatch section in httpd.conf.

 5.) Hide htaccess.txt from the url, since we are now on windows and we change .htacces to htaccess.txt the following changes should be made to FilesMatch section:

<FilesMatch "^ht">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
    Satisfy All
</FilesMatch>

Note: If you want sample data, you can download them from here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/installing-the-sample-data-for-magento To install the sample data, execute the ff command in the command prompt: 1.) Backup your existing magento database: mysqldump -u -p > 2.) Install the sample data: mysql -u -p <