I had to write this article cause I couldn’t find any complete solution to help people out with updating XAMPP in Windows. Well, finally here is an easy to understand, step by step guide to upgrade XAMPP that actually works. Kudos!

If you are updating XAMPP after a long time like me than be ready for some major changes. XAMPP no longer comes with the MySQL server. Since XAMPP 5.5.30 and 5.6.14, XAMPP ships MariaDB instead of MySQL. So copy pasting the mysql data files from old to new xampp won’t work anymore!

While updating XAMPP we basically face 2 challenges

Moving all the site files. This portion is easy, just a simple copy paste will do the trick.

Moving all the databases to the new server. And most often this is the main reason why most people do not update XAMPP very often. Cause backing up all the databases one by one and then importing them to the new server is a long and really boring task.