Citrus Skies

In Praise of MAMP

25 July 2006

It’s been quite busy round here recently, so much so that there hasn’t been time to add new notes to the site for nearly a month. To break the silence, I just want to post a short note about MAMP, a packaged distribution of Apache, MySQL and PHP for Mac OSX.

This little application (for that’s how it behaves) allows you to set up a test web server on your Mac in just a matter of seconds. Uploading content to the server is as simple as copying your pages or code into MAMP’s htdocs directory and “hey presto!” your site is available for testing.

Starting & stopping the web server is performed by simply opening & closing the MAMP application and with phpMyAdmin included as part of the distribution, testing database-driven functionality is a breeze.

I’m currently working on a collaboration project, where the target host server wasn’t available by the time we were ready to test some newly developed functionality. MAMP has proved itself invaluable in this case, allowing us to side-step the potential delay and proceed on schedule.

For this reason alone, I felt MAMP deserved a little bit of praise.

Article Tags: apache, mac osx, mysql, php, server, web, mamp