Wordpress permalinks on WAMP

WordPress and WAMPserver are one of the best buddies when you want to write a personal localhost’ed blog. Recently, when I installed wordpress and chose to use ‘pretty permalinks’, all I got is Error 404-File not found. i checked the .htaccess file if the changes have been written to it. Yes, the changes were made to it and yet it won’t work.

The silly mistake I was making all the time was trying it with mod_rewrite disabled. Having used XAMPP in the past-which has mod_rewrite enabled by default, I had no idea that for WAMPserver, it would be turned off by default. So the simple fix is to enable mod_rewrite. To enable it, follow the below steps:

Click on the WAMPserver tray icon > Apache > Apache modules > Scroll down the list of available modules and clcik on ‘rewrite_module’. The Apache server would be restarted automatically and you can now use the pretty permalinks.

This also works for the ‘Internal Server Error’ error message as well.