Grav and XAMPP?

Today I have got my new PC and started setting it up. I have moved a lot of files from my old system to my new one but something seems to be misconfigured.

After 8+ years of working with my old PC it was time for a new one. (Had to wait during some processes quite a long time and hope that this reduces with the new one.)

So I have set up Windows 11 (tried debian in combination with Proxmox before but was not that happy with AMD and Linux) and after installing some basic software I came to the point to move the first part of my development stack, XAMPP and Grav. First it looked promising but when I tried to fetch a developed site for the first time it showed some errors. So the idea behind this post is to document the most important steps to activate the features required by Grav in XAMPP.

1. Set up / check the configuration of virtual hosts
2. Do not forget about the default / fallback configuration in the virtual hosts. It has to be the first entry so that it will match all requests without a proper configuration

   <VirtualHost *:80>
   DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs"
   ServerName localhost
   </VirtualHost>

   3. Enable gd in the php.ini file. You can access this file via the "Control panel", see the following screenshot:
      
      Just search for the following term and remove the semicolon:

      ;extension=gd