help please - setting up php and http server localy

i want to make my webpage and among many other things i started to learn php
i'm looking for some simple way to test/run my php files on my computer

until now i installed apache http server and also php runtime
i "think" i configured everything properly...
i'm triyng to connect to my apache server like this:
http:\127.0.01~user1
but nothing happens

so to sum things up after 5 hours i'm pretty tired from configuring this apache server: everything must be done manually and there is so many different options

basicly what i want is to be able to put my website localy on my computer and test it

what do you mean by 'Nothing Happens'?

i mean that i should see in the logs that there was a conection attempt
like i can see for example if i ran ftp server

well now i know that the problem is with settings
because if i write like this i reach the server
http://127.0.0.1:8080

so i will check the settings

thanks

If you have another web server installed on your machine that uses port 80 then you will need to use another port (8080) to run your Apache server on. if you want apache to use port 80 then just comment out the line that looks like

Listen 8080
or
Listen xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8080

in the httpd.conf file.