What best practices should be followed when setting up a local development environment for PHP and MySQL integration?

When setting up a local development environment for PHP and MySQL integration, it is important to ensure that you have the necessary software installed such as PHP, MySQL, and a web server like Apache or Nginx. Additionally, you should create a database for your project and configure the connection settings in your PHP code to connect to the database.

<?php
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "root";
$password = "";
$dbname = "my_database";

// Create connection
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}
echo "Connected successfully";
?>