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Create a local web testing server on your mac

August 20th, 2008

Have you ever wanted to create a local testing server on your mac that supports PHP and MySQL? It’s now very simple using the application MAMP. (Mac/Apache/MySQL/PHP)

1) Download MAMP from their website to your Mac.

Download the 127mb DMG from here. You’ll notice there’s two options MAMP Free and MAMP Pro. Drag the MAMP Free application to your Applications folder. Now it’s installed, you can un-mount the disk image.

 

2) Startup MAMP from your Application folder

When you startup MAMP a window in your browser is automatically opened. This gives you all the information you need (should you want it) to access MAMP databases UNIX, and phpMyAdmin. You’ll notice the browser web address is http://localhost:8888/MAMP/

 

3) The MAMP application & preferences

This window shows you what’s running on your mac. Apache and PHP should have green lights by now. There are some important options in the preferences tab. 

First off, uncheck “Check for MAMP Pro” and also “Stop servers when quitting MAMP” if you want to test your sites when MAMP is closed. 

Secondly, you have the option to set the Apache and MySQL ports of to either the local value of your mac or if you are running other testing servers on your mac leave at MAMP default of 8888 and 8889. I chose to set mine to the mac default of 80 and 3306.

Finally, you can change the location of your sites folder rather than the default location of the application folder. Close preferences and MAMP will reconfigure itself. The browser address required for your sites is now simply http://localhost/

 

4) Widget installation

One more useful note is the inclusion of the OSX widget located in the applications folder. Double click to install. Now you can effortlessly open the start page as well as easily start and stop the local servers.