Installing dvwa in 2023 the right way!

In this blog, I will show you on how to install dvwa in windows 10.

Requirements:

step 1 xampp
step 2 Creating the “dvwa” database
step 3 Downloading and setting up the DVWA
step 4 Setting-up the dvwa “config”

Step 1 — XAMPP.

(If you have XAMPP, you can skip this part)

1. Install xampp.

you may download xampp in here https://www.apachefriends.org/

2. Install xampp.

If you got an error about UAC, just proceed or click “OK”, and the installation will still go thru.

3. START XAMPP! After installing xampp, go ahead and run in buy starting Apache and Mysql.

Step 2— Creating the “dvwa” database.

1. Create a new database and named it “dvwa” — Navigate to phpMyAdmin and create a new database “dvwa”.

name the new database dvwa and click create

2. After creating the database, leave it as is. Do not fill-out the table name and number of columns

After creating the database, leave it as is. Do not proceed to the table name and number of columns

Step 3 — Downloading and setting up the DVWA

1. using your browser/search engine, search for “dvwa github” or you can directly visit https://github.com/digininja/DVWA
2. Download the zip file from github and move it inside your htdocs folder (htdocs is located in xampp folder)

3. After completely downloading, and moving it to htdocs folder, extract the zip file.

4. Inside the extracted folder, you will find multiple files and folders just like the image below:

Hold into that, well get back to those files and folders later ( we will later copy all those files.)

5. Navigate inside the “htdocs” folder, then create a new folder “dvwa”:

7. Lastly, copy all the files and folders from the extracted zip file and paste it all inside the new “dvwa” folder:

Step 4— Setting-up the dvwa “config”

1. Inside the dvwa folder you will find a folder name “config”

Navigate to config folder and you will find “config.inc.php.dist”

2. Make a copy of “config.inc.php.dist” file and convert that copy into a php file like this “config.inc.php”.

(You can rename it and delete the .dist extension)

3. Next, type in localhost/dvwa into your browser and you should see an error. Regardless of the error, the last thing we need to do is to modify the config.inc.php:

Edit the config.inc.php using a text editor (notepad)

Change the db_user into root
Remove the password (leave it blank without any spaces)

Save it and reload the localhost/dvwa and you should see the login page:

4. Login using the default user name and password username: admin password: password

Great! Happy Pentesting!