Friday iFAQ: MAMP
Every Friday1 we publish a list of inFrequently Asked Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.
Today we look at MAMP: the german server software for you.
Q: Apple lied to me, man!
A: How’s that again?
Q: They said every Mac has all the software needed to be a web server built in.
A: Which is true.
Q: Except for PHP, man! I wrote a php website and it totally didn’t get served. No service! Web server fail, I say!
A: Easy there, oddly phrased hippie person! So, you turned on the “Web Sharing” thing…
Q: …Put a php file in my “sites” folder…
A: …And it didn’t do what you wanted. Yeah, been there. There’s two ways to deal with that.
Q: Yeah? what are they?
A: First, you could just edit the Apache configuration file to load the php module
Q: You lost me at “edit”.
A: Or you could download MAMP.
Q: What’s that? It sounds like someone with the mumps saying mump.
A: Don’t be weird. MAMP is a program that gives you a Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP web server. So you can do all your awesome server side scripting simply.
Q: Sweet!
A: Sure! Simply start several servers… okay, enough alliteration. MAMP sets up a local copy of PHP, MySQL and Apache that all runs separate and apart from the bulit-in “web sharing” server, so you can hack away at it’s config files and not screw up your mac. It makes it much easier to turn your MacBook into a development server.
Q: Wait, what? My MacBook? What about my iBook?
A: Sure. It’s Universal.
Q: Cosmic.
- for sufficiently vague definitions of “Friday” [↩]
I still have a working iBook. Maybe I could go into the server business
I think you need an internet connection for that.
There’s always a catch!