Before we start writing PHP code, it is good to install XAMPP package from Apache Friends. XAMPP is a full-featured AMPP (Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl) and a non-commercial middleware stacks available on Linux. After installation, you can use your local PC or laptop to run web bot or spider scripts, or even test out a full-featured product site, such as Joomla or Wordpress before upload to live server.
XAMPP is very stable and you can run screen scraping scripts for weeks from your PC without problems, assuming your scripts are clean, no memory leak etc. Domain name and web hosting are not needed to run your PHP/MySQL program on XAMPP. Sometimes you do not even need internet access during script writing.
