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
   1. First, go to “System Preferences”, then “Sharing”
   2. On your brower, go to http://127.0.0.1
   3. You should now see the Apache start page
2. Setup PHP and configure the Apache config file
   1. You’re going to want to get TextWrangler from http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.shtml
   2. 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. You should now restart Apache by going to “Sharing” and unchecking, then rechecking the “Web Sharing” checkbox
3. Manually install MySQL
   1. 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!