I figured this would be the place to go for MAMP-minded Mac users. Basically, I've been a Mac user for ages, but I'm having a very tough time getting it to meet my development needs. The specific need is for a reliable, configurable local MAMP stack that behaves like most other *AMP servers.
Here's what I've tried:
None of them work right, which is a far cry from how easy a good development LAMP stack can be set up on a Debian box. And the kicker is that there's not much turning back once you go the MacPorts or the compile-from-source (manually) route, and I've had the most success when doing the initial server install over a clean Leopard install. Note that these woes go back to Tiger, which I was using when I began doing *AMP development in earnest.
Does anyone here use a MAMP development stack built on Leopard? I mostly do PHP and a bit of Python, and I always end up using MySQL for the database side of things. Any specific advice?
I've gotten discouraged, as I've put quite a bit of time into getting a normal MAMP stack running, and still haven't come up with one as "normal" and reliable as the XAMPP stack I setup on my office Windows box that took fifteen minutes (and I'm practically lost when using Windows).
Here's what I've tried:
- OSX-bundled Apache and PHP, installed MySQL binary
- MacPorts-based server
- Completely from source, from scratch
- MAMP (as in the software package)
None of them work right, which is a far cry from how easy a good development LAMP stack can be set up on a Debian box. And the kicker is that there's not much turning back once you go the MacPorts or the compile-from-source (manually) route, and I've had the most success when doing the initial server install over a clean Leopard install. Note that these woes go back to Tiger, which I was using when I began doing *AMP development in earnest.
- I never was able to get a stack based on the bundled Apache and MySQL to work well, mainly because at the time I had trouble getting PHP to talk to MySQL.
- The MacPorts server was probably the best of the bunch, but it builds a ton of duplicate dependencies and I couldn't get mod_python working with it. Also borked /usr/bin/env in certain ways...
- Completely from scratch: I learned quite a bit, but the thing barely worked. On a good day, the databases (PGSQL and MySQL) would talk to Apache, but it was generally unreliable.
- MAMP has actually been good thus far, until recently when the Drupal CCK module started crashing any site that included it in 5.x. As I only recently started using MAMP.app, I feel that this is probably the tip of the iceburg, and it does make Drupal development near-impossible on my Mac.
Does anyone here use a MAMP development stack built on Leopard? I mostly do PHP and a bit of Python, and I always end up using MySQL for the database side of things. Any specific advice?
I've gotten discouraged, as I've put quite a bit of time into getting a normal MAMP stack running, and still haven't come up with one as "normal" and reliable as the XAMPP stack I setup on my office Windows box that took fifteen minutes (and I'm practically lost when using Windows).