Moving Wordpress Site to Local Host

[Nugget]

I have a wordpress site already online. I've just downloaded xampp and want to use it to test alterations to the sites code before I put the changes online.
I've downloaded all the files from the site and put them into the htdocs folder. When I managed to access the site through my localhost it showed a page where i entered the site name, admin, password and email. Then I was brought to the default kubrick template.

How do I go about getting my site properly visible? How do I import my wordpress database into the site?

Any help would be appreciated

 

[mneylon]

Start with the basics

Can you get a basic php info page to display?

Is MySQL working properly?

Do you have PHPMyAdmin installed locally?

 

[Nugget]

Yes, I ran a basic 'Hello World' php file when I installed xampp.
PHPMyAdmin comes with xampp so yes it's installed locally and MySQL seems to be working okay, I can go into PHPMyAdmin and create new databases

 

[mneylon]

Create an empty DB in MySQL
Take a dump of your existing blog's DB
Import the dump into the empty DB .. you can do this via phpmyadmin or using other methods
Edit the wp-config.php to use localhost + the mysql login details of your dev system
Also check the paths in the imported DB and the hostname

 

[Nugget]

Thank you! managed to get the database sorted so everythings working perfectly now

 

[Nugget]

Hi, I'm having another issue with this now.
I managed to lose the old files I got this working with last time so I had to do it again. I got it working someway okay. When I access the site on my localhost it shows the home page perfectly. When I click on a link to a post or a category I get this error:
Object not found!
The requested URL was not found on this server. The link on the referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. Please inform the author of that page about the error.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster

The url looks perfectly right to me so does anyone know why it can't find the pages?

 

[Nugget]

Just need to add that the links work when I changed the permalinks settings to default, they don't work with the custom structure I'm using /%postname%

 

[php.allstar]

Hi check that your .htaccess file exists and has the proper structure.

 

[wibble.ie]

one thing that you may need to check is that your mod_rewrite (rewrite module) on XAMPP server is activated. I had this problem with wamp in the past, as far as I remember mod_rewrite is not activated by default. That should sort the problem, it did when I got it.