Best WAMP Magento Development Environment

Well, after some screwing around I found what I think is a good dev environment, maybe it will help you. Tried out a few and AMPPS seems really nice as it has latest versions, and a very good control panel. Also it seems faster than WAMP. It has softaculous built-in to it so is easy to test out scripts if needed.

It is:

1) AMPPS

Install from: http://www.ampps.com/download

2) Xdebug Extension

Copy and paste your phpinfo output to: http://xdebug.org/wizard.php and it will show you exactly how to install it.

Here is what I put in php.ini to turn it on:

xdebug.remote_host=localhost

xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp

xdebug.remote_enable=1

Screenshot showing how it can dump out variables at a breakpoint:

3) APC Cache

Download from here: http://downloads.php.net/pierre/ put it in your extensions folder for ampps, and put in php.ini: extension=php_apc.dll

It is nice cause it runs pretty fast and the Xdebug thing is pretty nice for setting breakpoints. It will run up to that breakpoint and dump all the variables as shown in the attached screenshot.

4) Magento Notes

localhost does not work good for some reason logging into the admin it doesn't set cookies right so set your url to be 127.0.0.1/yourfolder/ in your mysql database table > core_configs that is what I found after comparing my install with a softaculous install that is how it does it so that is how it works.