Setting up a CodeIgniter Site

it’s easiest to install a package such as Xampplite, which installs Apache, PHP, and MySQL on to a Windows machine with minimum configuration by you,If you aren’t familiar with the process of setting up a web server. It also helps to have a good PHP editor on your system. You can do it all on a text editor, but I find that the syntax highlighting feature of a good editor saves me from making lots of simple mistakes with unclosed brackets or mismatched quotation marks and notepad++ is enough for me too.

Once you’ve reached this far, now to have CI running on your system. Once your server is set up, go to the CodeIgniter site at http://www.codeigniter.com/ and download the latest version of the framework. Version 1.7.1, the latest, is only 893KB when zipped, so the download doesn’t take that long. Unzip the folder, and install the CodeIgniter files in your web root folder. If you are using Xampplite(XAMPP), this is usually the htdocs folder within the Xampplite folder. Included with CI is a comprehensive user guide (in the user_guide folder). You’ll use this a lot. It is usually clear, and often goes into more detail than this book can. So, try it if you get stuck.

When these files are on your machine, you can access them in two ways:
As a URL—e.g., http://127.0.0.1
Through the normal directory path: e.g.,
C:/xampplite/htdocs/index.php or http://localhost/CodeIgniter_1.7.1
You should be able to see the CI welcome screen by simply navigating to your URL with the browser. It’s that simple! The welcome page tells you that what you are seeing is built by two files, a view and a controller.

(source:Upton, David. 2007. CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development. Packt Publishing, Birmingham.)