newbie questions

[photonkid]

I'm trying to figure out what happens when I type "localhost" or "localhost/wordpress" etc into my browser address bar. I have xampp installed in tools/xampp.

It seems that based in a setting in a file in xampp/apache, the file xampp/htdocs/index.php gets executed by the php engine. Is this the case for both the above URLs "localhost" and "localhost/wordpress"?

index.php then seems to redirect to tools/xampp/htdocs/xampp/index.php - is that correct?

I installed wordpress using bitnami and it got installed to tools/xampp/apps/wordpress
and I'd like to know how does localhost/wordpress find its way to
tools/xampp/apps/wordpress/htdocs/index.php

Also, at what point does the apache web server get fired up - does the browser locate xampp/htdocs/index.php itself when the URL is "localhost" and hand that to the apache webserver?

Thanks for any info.

[photonkid]

[answering my own question]

Well I figured some of it out. It seems that when the browser processes a URL it sends a request (dunno exactly what) to port 80 of that URL. When the URL is 127.0.0.1, the request loops back to my computer and local Apache is listening on port 80.

Then in xampp/apache/conf/httpd.conf there is
Include "...tools/xampp/apps/wordpress/conf/httpd-prefix.conf"

and in httpd-prefix.conf there is this line
Alias /wordpress ".../tools/xampp/apps/wordpress/htdocs"

which makes apache redirect localhost/wordpress to
.../xampp/apps/wordpress/htdocs
instead of .../xampp/htdocs/wordpress