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Setup MAMP Environment on OS X 10.8

This post is a tutorial of how to set up MAMP (Mac-Apache-MySQL-PHP) development environment on Mac OS X 10.8 (a.k.a Mountain Lion).

OS X is a developer-friendly operating system with a bunch of ready-to-use tools and components (though many are not the latest and some times even unusable). Although there is bundled MAMP available. Mountain Lion is shipped with Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.3.15, and with these two you can set up MAMP (relatively) easily (the only missing part is MySQL).

A little tip: almost all commands below requires administrator privilege. So make sure you are among the sudoers.

Set up Apache with Virtual Hosts

Before Mountain Lion, you can enable OS X builtin web server via System Preference. However, with ML, you have to enable it via command line.

You can type command apachectl start to use it right now. Visit http://localhost in your browser and if you see "It works!" then it really works! :)

The default DocumentRoot is at /Library/WebServer/Documents. You can host static pages there but we certainly need more: the ability to execute PHP scripts and virtual hosts.

Let's do it.

First use your favorite text editor to edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. Uncomment line 117 (you can search php to locate it):

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

and line 477 (search vhosts):

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Then edit extra/httpd-vhosts.conf to add your virtual hosts. You can follow the two existing sample vhost configurations. (BTW, I recommend you to comment the examples out.)

A sample configuration is as follows:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin you@example.com
    DocumentRoot "/Users/you/Sites/sample"
    ServerName example.local
    ErrorLog "/private/var/log/apache2/example.local-error_log"
    CustomLog "/private/var/log/apache2/example.local-access_log" common
    <Directory "/Users/you/Sites/sample">
        AllowOverride FileInfo
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Note the Directory section. The AllowOverride directive enables .htaccess at DocumentRoot, which is useful if you want to rewrite URL to index.php (a must-have if you do WordPress development like me). The Allow directive ensures visitors from all hosts can access the server.

Now you can type httpd -S command to test if anything is going well. If you see Syntax OK on the last line outputed (possibily along with some warnings), you are cool. Type apachectl restart to restart Apache. You can test if PHP works by writing a simple script in the doc root and visiting it.

Install and Configure MySQL

As said above, you need to download MySQL from the official website first. The current latest version supports 10.7 and by my experience, it works fine on 10.8. If you are as lazy as me, you'd prefer .dmg as it is simple to install.

After you mount the disk image, you will see 4 items (3 installable plus a readme). Theoretically only the first one (MySQL) is required. The second item (preference panel) is recommended as with it you can directly start/stop MySQL in the System Preference. Whether to install third one (startup item) is up to you.

Attention: there is a catch after MySQL installation. The PHP function mysql_connect requires the existence of /var/mysql/mysql.sock. However, the socket file is actually installed at /tmp/mysql.sock. I have no idea if everyone would encounter this, but if you do, make a symbolic link like this:

mkdir -p /var/mysql
ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock

Now start MySQL and you can test it the way you prefer.

Now your MAMP environment should work smoothly.

I wrote this because I switched to a new MacBook and had to set up a development environment for WordPress again. Having struggled with the same hazards a second time, I think I'd better write this little tutorial for everyone who needs it, including (maybe) the future me.