Patchwork Psychology

I was looking for a quick and simple way for my graphic designer friend to develop/test PHP locally–for Mac. Being a long-time Linux and burgeoning UNIX guy, my first though ran to compiling PHP and MySQL and connecting it into the Apple-supplied Apache. I didn’t enjoy the thought of walking my friend through this over email or phone, which I would have to do since he’s a few states away. I was hoping there’d be an easier way.

I started reading up on compiling PHP on Mac OS X, ever more dreading the possibility. There was no easy way to do it. I saw one post mention some entropy.ch binary releases, so I thought I’d check them out. It saved some compiling, but it still had to be connected into Apache. Probably that is not too difficult, but I wasn’t really interested in the possible messiness of it.

Then I saw a link for something called MAMP. They said it didn’t use the internal Apache, and it even had a dashboard widget to start it up! Sounds pretty sweet. So I checked it out at http://www.mamp.info/en/mamp.html. They seemed pretty legit, so I gave the download a try.

The install was as easy as any other Mac program…just drag the folder to the Applications folder. This also means that uninstalling is easy: just drag the folder to the Trash. Everything is contained right in the MAMP folder, so it doesn’t get messy all over your harddrive.

Inside the MAMP folder there are a several items, but only a few to be concerned with. First there’s the app, which starts and stops the Apache web server and the MySQL database server. There’s the htdocs folder, which is the / of the web server–so this is where all of your PHPs and JPGs would go. There’s also a cgi-bin folder for keeping any CGI scripts.

In the MAMP app there’s a button that’ll direct your web browser to the “start page”. This page has some useful information including the username and password you’ll need to have your PHPs access the MySQL database. It also has a link to PhpMyAdmin for administering the database.

Oh yeah…let’s not forget the sweet dashboard widget that it comes with. The widget is basically a smaller version of the MAMP app–it has a start/stop button and a button to launch the start page.

This seems like a fairly polished product that’s great for development use. The maker of MAMP, Living-e, also sells a PRO version that apparently makes it easy to set up virtual hosts, dynamic DNS and many other weaks.