Gibbon is a web app, just need to run it on a public web server. Hosting and maintaining a vm image would be a lot of additional work. Running a webserver on your windows machine will not hinder your work, it’s only a small service running in the background and will only take you 5 mins to be up and running.
While you could create a vm, it seems a bit overkill, would you setup wordpress on a vm?
Did you run these commands
sudo nano /etc/php/8.*/apache2/php.ini
Make sure you replace the * with the correct number based on the version you have.
Then in the nano editor you can change the value of this variables:
(you can search for them using ‘ctrl’ + ‘w’ - type ‘variable_name’ and press enter, than change the value
memory_limit = 256M
upload_max_filesize = 256M
max_execution_time = 360
max_input_vars = 5000 (make sure you delete ‘’;‘’ at the beginning of the text in the editor )
date.timezone = Europe/Rome
When you are done you can save by using ‘ctrl’ + ‘o’
Then press ‘Ctrl’ + ‘x’ to exit nano.
sudo service apache2 reload
sudo service apache2 restart
I have just setup a virtualbox vm - installed apache using the link I posted, went through the install How to install gibbon for noobs (like me) on debian 12 or Ubuntu and similar and its running fine, I would suggest not using XAMP and just setting up a webserver, and make sure you follow all the steps in [dardiv] instructions.