XAMPP keeps showing Dashboard/Welcome Page instead of the Configuration Page

Here is the solutions that worked for me:

1. open index.php from the htdocs folder
2. inside replace the word dashboard with your database name.
3. restart the server

This should resolve the issue :-)

Delete the file(index.php) from your xampp folder, you will get the list of directories and files from htdocs folder.

Open the htdocs folder there will be index.php file. In that file script is written to go in dashboard folder and show dashboard. So you just have to comment it or delete that script and write any code save it and run http://localhost now dashboard screen will not open and you will see what you have written in that file.

Hey here is the solution for windows 7+.

You need admin rights to make changes to the hosts file

Right click on your favorit text-editor and select "run as administrator" before opening the file

Open the following file "c:/windows/system32/driver/etc/hosts"

Enter the line:

127.0.0.1 localhost 

Next: Define a virtual host in /xampfolder/apache/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

<VirtualHost  127.0.0.1>
  DocumentRoot "c:\your\document\root"
  ServerName localhost
    <Directory "c:\your\document\root">
      Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
      Options All 
      AllowOverride All
      Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Restart your apache! Now you can enter http://localhost in your browser and access your page.

Pro-Tip: You can use other names as localhost or have multiple localhosts this way. Just enter the names in the hosts file and define your virtual hosts.