Typically you will develop a project in your local web server environment. There are two basic steps necessary:
Some project might not technically require its own local domain, but we recommend to use a local domain for each project regardless.
The terms VirtualHost and DocumentRoot are specific to the Apache web server - however, it is used interchangeably for NGINX’ equivalent as well.
Simply edit your /etc/hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts under Windows) and add a line like this:
127.0.0.1 example-project.local
This will instruct your operating system to redirect any request to the example-project.local domain to the local host (127.0.0.1), so that your local web server will handle the request.
After creating the local domain, use it for your VirtualHost of the project. The location of the appropriate Apache config file may vary - under Windows, when using the default XAMPP installation, it would be under C:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf.
The bare minimum VirtualHost configuration would look like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example-project.local
DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs/example-project/web"
</VirtualHost>
In this example, the project is located within C:/xampp/htdocs/example-project and it is a Contao project, where you need to point the DocumentRoot to the /web subfolder of the installation.
After this, you need to start or re-start your web server and the project should be accessible under http://example-project.local/ in your browser.