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Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at localhost

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  • 5 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by StewartBr

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I was building a wordpress website on my PC: using Firefox browser, accessing wordpress through WebMatrix which opened Firefox & showed a 'localhost:20238' address. It worked for 5 days then WebMatrix said ' website does not exist. I could still load it for 1 day using browser history. Then that failed too. Have ditched WebMatrix. Now loaded XAMPP & Wordpress (shown as succesful). Putting 'localhost' into address box. Error message: Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at localhost.

I was building a wordpress website on my PC: using Firefox browser, accessing wordpress through WebMatrix which opened Firefox & showed a 'localhost:20238' address. It worked for 5 days then WebMatrix said ' website does not exist. I could still load it for 1 day using browser history. Then that failed too. Have ditched WebMatrix. Now loaded XAMPP & Wordpress (shown as succesful). Putting 'localhost' into address box. Error message: Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at localhost.

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Does it work in other browsers?

When you enter http://localhost/ Firefox will try port 80, since that is the standard for web servers. If there is any other software on your computer listening on port 80, the web server might not be able to use it. Can you check your XAMPP settings and try using a different port such as 8080? Then you would access the server using http://localhost:8080/.

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Hi jscher2000!

Curious.

I changed the XAMPP/Apache 2.4 listening port to 8080, as suggested. Access failed.

I returned the setting to 80, as it was. Success!

Typed in 'localhost' & it instantly connected to 'http://localhost/xampp/index.php'.

So, mission accomplished. You will certainly understand why better than me! Thanks for your help.