localhost not working on xampp

Posted on 13th March 2009 by James Young | There are 17 comments so far

A remarkably boring and specific post but I suspect like me, a lot of people use XAMPP for local development and have suddenly found that a Vista update on or around the 11th March has meant you can’t browse to localhost on your machine despite no changes being made.

To fix this, you can do the following:

Go to C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\ and drag the hosts file into your open text editor and find this line:
::1 localhost
comment out the line so it looks like this:
# ::1 localhost

Save the file, clear your browser’s cache again and then try once again to go to http://localhost

Be sure to drag your host file to the desktop so you can save it and then drag it back to your etc folder.

The original solution/discussion is here: this thread on the XAMPP forums

Hope this helps those who find localhost isn’t working with XAMPP at the moment.

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17 people have commented on this entry

Arun Pattnaik

31st March 2009

Thanks a lot James. I was trying to find a solution to this problem for last few weeks. I hope it works for me :-)

Perry Molin

31st March 2009

Thank You. Much Appreciated.

Arun Pattnaik

31st March 2009

it worked. thanks a lot!

Danny

19th April 2009

Thanks alot, got it working now. Kudos to you. :)

muse

22nd April 2009

hi there i got the same problem but i am using WINDOW XP operating system. any one can help?

James Young

22nd April 2009

Hi Muse,

I’m not sure as I don’t run XP any more but have you tried the solution that works for Vista as outlined above?

I don’t know if the files in question are the same but you could take a copy of your original file and if it doesn’t fix it, just put the copy back and keep searching for a fix.

muse

22nd April 2009

Thanx James Young
i have tryed comment it as what it says for vista but it didn’t work any way tnx a lot mate.

James Young

22nd April 2009

Sorry, can’t help in that case. I had a look around for an XP fix for this problem but couldn’t find anything specific, just the fix for Vista.

It may be worth looking through your windows update logs for something installed by windows update around the time you noticed it stop working and uninstall that fix and see if that works?

Tanuj