I highly recommend using Laragon for local PHP development on Windows. I've used it for WordPress and Laravel development in the past, and it's just too easy to set up and get going to pass it up.

All the commands within this tutorial will need to be run within Laragon's Cmder app. This command line tool works within Laragon, which means you have access to PHP and Composer out of the box!

Laragon also comes packaged with HeidiSQL, a very easy to use MySQL management tool. We will need to create a user for Drupal to use. Click Tools > User manager to open the user manager window. Add a new user with global privileges. I like to use drupal for the username, and drupal for the password (this will make a step later on much quicker and easier).

Use composer to create your new project:

composer create-project drupal/recommended-project my-site-name

This will create a new Drupal site in the directory my-site-name. Make sure you reload Laragon, so it picks up the changes, and it will automatically set your hosts file so my-site-name.test/ works locally.

The website installer will appear in your browser, and you are free to use this to set up your site. However, if you want a quicker approach, I recommend using drush.

cd my-site-name
composer require drush/drush

Then, we can use drush to set up our project. Follow the wizard, which will ask you questions like the database username and password. The defaults to both are drupal, which is why I recommend setting up a username with those credentials to make this step quick.

php vendor/bin/drush site:install

You can alternatively use si instead of site:install as a shorthand.

The drush CLI will give you a default password for admin. However, I don't care about having a super secure password when working locally, so I like to change it using drush.

php vendor/bin/drush user:password admin password

This will set the password for the admin user to simply password.

You can alternatively use upwd instead of user:password

That's all you need for a fresh, new Drupal installation on your local Windows machine! Cheers 🍻