Okay, I just got a new desktop and have been struggling with getting a local server running so I can program without needing to commit, checkout and test on an external server.
This is behind a firewall first of all, so security shouldn't be any issue.
I installed the latest version of XAMPP (1.7.3), I make it as secure as possible (changing passwords, etc) then I put an extracted drupal into a subfolder of the htdocs folder, and I can access it. But I would like the url to not be http://localhost/drupal or something like that. I would prefer it to be http://mysite.local/ for example. To do this, I need to edit the virtual hosts config file.
This is the vhosts file (what's not commented anyway) as it is currently (I also relocated the drupal folder accordingly).
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
DocumentRoot C:/xampp/htdocs
ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost mysite.local>
DocumentRoot "C:/Users/tnanek/drupal-6"
ServerName mysite.local
<Directory "C:/Users/tnanek/drupal-6">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
When I go to mysite.local, it brings me to the main htdocs folder (I already modified my hosts file, so that is definitely from this computer).