iMac MAMP Server

Last night I finally bit the bullet and switched to a Mac. I've been wanting a new machine for a while now, but I couldn't figure out how to balance wanting to mess around with some development software and still have something my wife could use. I really wanted to go with Ubuntu, but it really doesn't offer the usability I like to have (I still think I'm going to put it on my old machine). Then I did some reading and discovered that OS X comes with Apache built right in, and all the dev tools I'm used to now have Mac versions. I was sold.

The point of this post isn't to gripe about what I like or hate about the new machine (for the record though, OS X is simply stunning), but rather to put a list of excellent resources to setup a MAMP server. Other people much smarter and more capable than me have written on this subject, but I found I had to go to a bunch of different spots to find it all. Here is what I found:

You're going to set things up in the following sequence:

1. Setup Apache
2. Setup PHP and configure the Apache config file
3. Manually install MySQL

So let's get started...

1. Setup Apache
• First, go to "System Preferences", then "Sharing"
• Click the "Web Sharing" check box
• On your brower, go to http://127.0.0.1
• You should now see the Apache start page
2. Setup PHP and configure the Apache config file
• You're going to want to get TextWrangler from http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.shtml
  
• Use this post from Foundation PHP for clear instructions on how to configure Apache and change the error handling defaults in the PHP configure file: http://foundationphp.com/tutorials/php_leopard.php
3. Manually install MySQL
• This is the most technical part of the setup, and it takes a few minutes. I found the following post at Hivelogic to be extremely helpful: http://hivelogic.com/articles/installing-mysql-on-mac-os-x/

At this point you should be ready to go... good luck!