Using Mahara/Development Environment Setup

The first thing you need to do is set up a development environment, if you haven't done so yet. The easiest way is to get a server running locally. Explanations are easy to find and it is quite straightforward. Simply google "installing {LMWX}AMP". I used XAMPP for my Mahara development.
 * MAMP (Mac),
 * WAMP (Windows),
 * LAMP (Linux)
 * XAMPP (cross platform).

The XAMPP family of products let you run an apache+PHP+MySQL server on your local machine, without the need to purchase and manage a hosting account.

Once you have your server running on the localhost running, download Mahara from the Mahara website. Move the zip into the htdocs folder of your {MWLX}AMP application. For instance, with XAMPP on mac, htdocs can be found in  Macintosh HD/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs

Unzip the archive and rename the folder to mahara or mahara13 if you are running multiple versions of Mahara.

You should now have htdocs/mahara.

You are ready to install Mahara. Before you can do that, you need the database that will be used to store all Mahara data to pre-exist. With [MWL]AMP, you have a button open start page, pointing to http://localhost:8888/MAMP/?language=English. Click it. Then click on the phpMyAdmin link on that page.

With XAMPP, navigate to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/. Click on the `Databases` tab if this view is not selected by default. You should see an option Create new database. Provide a name (Mahara or Mahara13 would do) and click create.

Provide and modify a file <tt>config.php</tt> as per the instructions in the README file.

Then navigate through the mahara folder in the browser to start the install process, http://localhost/mahara/ That should be it.

If you have any problem, post about them in the Mahara developer forum.