How to get Xampp working on your M1 chip Macbook pro

So... a while ago, my Macbook M1 pro was just a brand new machine with very little software installed. As a dev, obviously, I needed to install Xampp and a bunch of other applications that I always had on my Windows computer. I remember my installation was successful, but when i went back to use it this one time, I got one of the most annoying errors that I have received since I started using the M1. I don't know what happened! Suddenly, Xampp was incompatible with the M1??

Clicking on the "Show details" will show you an error that looks like...

INFO: Starting "XAMPP" stack ERROR: Error starting "XAMPP" stack: cannot calculate MAC address: hv_vm_create unknown error -85377023

Another thing i noticed is that my opening screen looked like this...

...instead of this....

So my next course of action, of course, was to search for solutions from StackOverflow, and I tried out a couple, but they weren't exactly working for me. I kept getting the same error when I launched the application.
It is possible that i might have been too frustrated to read through all the solutions properly and find the right one 🤷🏽‍♀️

Anyway, I concluded that Xampp was probably not compatible with the M1 (like many software) and moved on to other options. Alas! Today, I found myself in a similar position. I needed to self host a Learning Management System using Drupal, and I needed Xampp (to be my server) for that. Damn, I was back here again. So I tried starting Xampp again(the one that i had unsuccessfully tried to set up the last time) hoping that by some magic, it would work this time. LOL!
You guessed right, it didn't work.

Anyway, I did some Googling (with a lot more patience this time) and I came across this post by somebody who seemed to have a found a solution that worked.
Basically, what the author of the post did was this:

• Go to your Applications folder and make a copy of the Xampp application that you already have installed. Do not uninstall it! Make a copy!

• After you've done that, delete the original "Xampp" application. (Right click on it, and select "Move to bin")

• Open your browser, and enter this url. (You could also simply open this url in a new tab) https://www.apachefriends.org/tr/download.html

• Download the version 7.2.34/PHP 7.2.34 of the Xampp application. This is the exact link to the download page, if you don't want to have to look for it. Click the link where the arrow is pointed. https://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/files/XAMPP%20Mac%20OS%20X/7.2.34/
  

• Once the download is finished, click on the .dmg file to install Xampp (for real this time 😂). Launch your application.
  
  I hope you got this beautiful window!
  
  Good luck! I hope it worked for you!

Kindly share this blogpost with somebody who might be having some trouble with Xampp on the M1 Macbook Pro! Leave a comment if this blogpost helped you :).