Posted on Wednesday 27 July 2005 - Popularity: unranked
While OS X comes with it’s own installation of Apache, if you want to do more with it than just host files, than you need some additional features, for example PHP and mySQL. Now there are different ways to add this features to the already installed Apache web-server. The experienced users would download the PHP and the mySQL installation packages and than try to get all the configurations working, not exactly an easy task as being able to write PHP scripts and mySQL queries doesent meen that you know how to setup a webserver. I’m sure a lot of you out there already had the “pleasure” to experience this lesson.
Now of course there’s a solution to this problem or I wouldn’t write this post. The solution comes to us by the name MAMP. You really just have to download and run the installer and your server is ready. MAMP actualy doesent bother with the already installed Apache, or any additional packages you’ve already installed, it just installs a completly new server where everything just works. You can even run the new server together with the old Apache if you wish. Really the only thing you have to do if you want to have the server visible from the outside is to tell your router about the new servers port. You can set the port in a little config GUI that comes with MAMP where you as well start/stop the server or your mySQL database. To admin your database, you get an installation of phpMyAdmin already perfectly configurated, you never have to open the terminal at all.
One last thing, if you’ve already used the Apache installation that came with OS X, don’t search the htdocs folder at it’s old place, the place you put your files is now inside the MAMP folder: …/applications/MAMP/htdocs/
Fredi
