Installation

First thing first, get wordpress directly, or from the download page.

If working locally (ie WAMP), create a folder where you want to serve up your site from – for example D:\mywamp\wp\public_html.

Extract all the files from the the .zip file (or .tar.gz if that’s what you went for) into this folder.

Apache Settings

My site url will be abase.localhost as the theme I will build for this installation is to be called Adaptive Base, and will be built upon the underscores ( _s ) base theme.

Edit your hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) and make an entry for your website. Mine is as follows:
127.0.0.1 abase.localhost

Edit your apache vhosts file to include your new site details

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "D:\mywamp\www\\local\underscore\public_html"
ServerName abase.localhost
ErrorLog "logs/abase.error_log"
CustomLog "logs/abase.access_log" common
</VirtualHost>

MySQL

Create a database for your installation to use

Open up a cmd window and at the prompt, type in
mysql -u[privileged_username] -p
and press Enter.

Enter the password for the privileged user (root is fine on a local test machine) at the prompt.

At the prompt, type the following (where dbname is the name you wish to give your database):
CREATE DATABASE dbname;

You should see: Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

Now enter the following (replacing dbname, username, and password with their respective fields for your installation:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON dbname.* TO ‘username’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

Make a note of the fields you entered above as you will need them for your WordPress installation configuration.