Modern XAMPP releases no longer ship with MySQL; since October 2015 (versions 5.5.30 and 5.6.14), it has used MariaDB as a drop-in replacement. If your project specifically requires , you must either download a very old legacy version of XAMPP or manually replace the default MariaDB engine with the original MySQL binaries. Option 1: Manually Integrating MySQL 5.7 into XAMPP
The most reliable way to get a modern version of PHP working with MySQL 5.7 is to swap the database folders manually. Replace MariaDB with MySQL - XAMPP - GitHub Gist download xampp mysql 5.7