I tried Ampps for my development Windows PC, but had a variety of problems. Enough that I gave up on that idea and just went the route of installing Softaculous on Xampp.
This suited me fine, as I have existing sites running on Xampp and didn't want to configure them all again. And the installation went fairly smoothly.
But then came the actual act of installing WordPress. Oh my. Here are the steps:
Configure new virtual hosts (config shown below) and validate them using httpd -S. Also, set them up in the hosts file.
Restart Apache.
In Chrome, go to the Softaculous enduser page
WordPress is listed as a top script, so click Install
The Install page looks just like it did on Ampps, but the Choose Domain lookup only lists 127.0.0.1.
I have more than ten virtual hosts configured and they all work fine in all other respects I can think of. I can browse and use the sites running on them and one of them is already running WordPress.
Here is the configuration I tried to use for the virtual hosts:
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs/wp/sca"
ServerName sourcecodeadventures.local
ServerAlias sourcecodeadventures.local
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "C:/xampp/htdocs/wp/sca/cgi-bin/"
ErrorLog "logs/sca-error.log"
CustomLog "logs/sca-access.log" common
<Directory "C:/xampp/htdocs/wp/sca">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride all
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from all
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
I have also tried leaving this as the only content of the httpd-vhosts.conf file.