Download MAMP & MAMP PRO MAMP & MAMP PRO 6.0.1 macOS 10.13+ & 64-Bit processor (Intel) Users of version 5 can update at a low price. MAMP & MAMP PRO 4.2.0 Windows 7, 8.1, 10.
Do you want to install and use WordPress on your local Mac computer? This guide will walk you through how to setup MAMP and install WordPress on your Apple Mac computer.
What is MAMP PRO 5? MAMP PRO is a configuration application that helps you set up and run the Apache or Nginx web servers and the MySQL 5.7 database server. It also takes care of the configuration of different versions of PHP. MAMP PRO also comes with a text editor, and built in functionality to move your site to a remote host provider. MAMP offers two different PHP versions in MAMP 3.0 for Mac. Choose the latest PHP version for maximum compatiblities with your local web applications, also higher security and more stable performance when the local sites being migrated to live server.
By creating a local WordPress install on your Mac means you can run WordPress privately without the need to have a hosting server while you play around or develop your site.
No one else can access your MAMP website because it is a server on your own computer. If you wish to publish it online then you need it to be hosted on an external hosting server.
When you are finished working on your site then you can transfer your local install onto a hosting server where everyone can access it.
Installing WordPress on your local Mac is a very similar process to installing WordPress on your hosting server. There may be different underlying software that runs it but it is still the same WordPress. The software in this case that we will be using is MAMP.
What is MAMP?
MAMP is a simple and easy application that you install on your Mac computer that allows you to setup and run a virtual hosting server on your computer. This means that you can run WordPress and other similar web applications directly on your computer.
MAMP is an acronym that stands for:
- macOS (Your computers operating system)
- Apache (the server software)
- MySQL (the database management system) and
- PHP (the programming language).
Most people will run MAMP on their Mac so they can quickly and easily develop their application or WordPress website without needing to continually upload to a server to see their changes.
WordPress requires a server, database and PHP software to run on so MAMP is the perfect solution if you are on Mac.
How to install MAMP on your Mac computer
This section of the guide will walk you through how to install MAMP on your Mac computer. We will be downloading MAMP and then setting it up with the best settings to develop WordPress with.
- Download MAMP
You need to download the MAMP installer from the MAMP website download page.You can download just the free version of MAMP or if you need extra features then you can choose to purchase MAMP Pro. You do not need MAMP Pro to run WordPress and we will be using the free version in this tutorial.Click the Download button to download the MAMP installer. - Install MAMP
Once the installer has finished downloading, double click it to install MAMP. Follow the install steps by clicking through the install process. - Open MAMP
MAMP will be installed in your Applications folder. Go to your applications folder and click on the MAMP application inside the MAMP folder.Note: If you also installed MAMP Pro then make sure you select the right MAMP application. - Configure MAMP
There are not a lot of preferences to configure with MAMP but we recommend you customize them to your own preferences.You can open preferences by going to the MAMP > Preferences… menu at the top or using the keyboard combination of ⌘, keys at the same time.Here are a couple of preferences that you might want to consider configuring:
Start/Stop
If you are using MAMP often, then you should tick the Start servers option so you do not have to start it manually.You do not need to run MAMP if you untick the stop servers when quitting MAMP option. That way you can close MAMP and your local install will still run.You should set your favorite link to “/” if you have your WordPress website located in the base directory. If your WordPress site is installed in a folder called “wpabsolute” then you can set the favorite link to “/wpabsolute” and then you will be able to click on the my favorite link to open your WordPress website.
Port
By default, your ports will be 8888 and 8889. If you click the Set Web & MySQL ports to 80 & 3306 then when you access your website, you can use the url http://localhost URL instead of http://localhost:8888 on the end.The only trade off is that you will need to put in your admin password to start the server when using port 80.
Web-Server
This section allows you to set a custom location to store your WordPress website(s) on your computer. By default it is set to the htdocs folder in the MAMP folder in your applications folder.This can be annoying if you are accessing the folder often and you do not have a shortcut to the folder somewhere more accessible.We recommend creating your own website folder inside your documents or similar folder so it is easy navigate to and you wont lose your website if MAMP gets updated or removed. The folder can be named whatever you like e.g. wpabsolute.Click on the folder icon to set a new document root if you desire.When you are happy with your preferences, click on the OK button to save.
MAMP is now setup and ready to use on your Mac computer. When you have setup WordPress and want to run it, you will need to make sure both your Apache and MySQL server is running. You can start the servers by clicking the Start servers button.
The next step is to download and install WordPress.
Installing WordPress in MAMP
This section of the guide walks you through how to install WordPress with MAMP. You will need to download WordPress and then create a database and configure WordPress.
Lets begin!
- Download WordPress
Go to WordPress.org and download the latest version as a zip file onto your Mac computer.Extract the zip file once it has finished downloading and copy the folder to your root directory that you set in the MAMP preferences. If you did not set any location the copy it to Applications > MAMP folder > htdocs. - Access WordPress installer
Now that the WordPress files are installed in the right location then you can begin setting up WordPress.
Navigate to http://localhost/ in your browser.You should see your WordPress folder located there. Navigate through the folder structure until you see the WordPress Install language selector. - Select Language
If your language is anything other than English then you can select it from the list of languages.
Click Continue to proceed to the next step. - Let’s Go!
This page is just a welcome page that tells you what to expect in the installer.
Simply click the Let’s Go! button to proceed to the next step. - Configure Database
This step requires you to configure your database. If you have not created a database through MAMP then you will need to do that before you can enter the details and proceed.To create a new database, in a new browser window, navigate to http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/ to access phpMyAdmin. phpMyAdmin is a database management tool that comes on most servers that has mySQL installed on it.phpMyAdmin allows you to create, edit, update and delete your database.Because you have not yet created the database then we will need to create one. In the left hand sidebar menu you will see a small New button. When clicked it will bring up the new database creation window. Type in a name for your database e.g. “wpabsolute” and click the Create button to save your new database.Take note of the name of your database as you will need to enter it in on the WordPress installer.Navigate back to the WordPress installer window in your browser and enter the database name into the database name field.‘root’ is the default value for both the username and password.
‘localhost’ is the default value for the database host.You can leave table prefix as ‘wp_’ on your local computer. It is often recommended as a security feature to change the prefix but you can leave that step for on your live server.Once you have entered all of the database values then click the submit button to proceed to the next step. - Run Installation Sparky
The next window will simply say that it has everything needed to run the installation. Click on the Run the Installation button to proceed to the next step. - Add Website Information
The Welcome page asks you information about your WordPress site.
Create a title for your site and add your username, password and email address.You do not need to tick the discourage search engines checkbox as you are developing on your local computer and search engines and other computers will not be able to reach your site anyway.Once you have filled out the fields, click the Install WordPress button to proceed to the final step. - Success!
Your WordPress website has now been installed. You can click the Log In button to go to the login page of your new local WordPress site.
WordPress is now successfully installed on your local Mac computer. You can now Run WordPress on your Mac using MAMP just like how you would on any other hosting server.
Using WordPress and MAMP moving forward
Now that you have WordPress installed on MAMP you do not need to install anything else. You can simply use your WordPress website on your local computer.
You access your WordPress website in the browser by going to http://localhost make sure you have started the servers on your MAMP application. If you shut down your computer then you will have to restart the servers again in MAMP to run your WordPress website.
To access the files of your WordPress website, you simply need to either navigate to the new root folder that you created in MAMP or if you left it as default then you need to navigate to
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs to see your WordPress install.
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs to see your WordPress install.
If you wish to create a new WordPress install then you simply need to create a second database in phpMyAdmin and create a new folder next to your other folder in the root document folder with all of the WordPress files in it.
Once you have finished building with WordPress on your local Mac computer then you will likely want to move WordPress to a live hosting server. Follow our migrating WordPress from local to live hosting server guide to help you with the migration.
This guide walks you through how to install WordPress on your Mac computer with MAMP. Let us know in the comments below how helpful it was to you. If you need assistance then also add your comments and we will help you out.
Finally, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to join the social discussion and be the first to know when new tutorials will be published to help you.
Related
MAMP stands for My Apache MySQL PHP. It help its users set up personal web server and manage websites locally on their Mac or Windows computers. It brings web developers the freedom to design websites offline at first and easily transfer websites to web host provider later. You can install MAMP on Mac or Windows according to your OS. In this guide, we will discuss how to install MAMP on Mac OS X step by step, how to set up Apache server, PHP, ports, MySQL database server on your local Mac computer.
How to Install MAMP on Mac?
MAMP for Mac comes with two versions, a free version and a Pro version which cost $59. In this tutorial we will focus on the free version. You will learn how to install MAMP on Mac for free below.
The installing of MAMP on a Mac is pretty easy. You need to download its installation package from the official website. Here is the download link of MAMP for Mac: http://www.mamp.info/en/downloads/
The installing of MAMP on a Mac is pretty easy. You need to download its installation package from the official website. Here is the download link of MAMP for Mac: http://www.mamp.info/en/downloads/
When the downloading completes, double Click on the installer and you will start the installation of MAMP for Mac.
The installation package version 3.0.5 comes with both MAMP & MAMP PRO. So if you do not change the settings and leave most of them by default, you can go through the standard installation which has both MAMP and MAMP PRO installed on your Mac.
In this case, we will install only the free MAMP version, not the premium pro version. So click on Custom from above screen and you will get a screen like this:
Check only the MAMP, uncheck MAMP Pro and continue to finish the installing.
Before you go to use it to create websites locally, you need to configure your local server with it. After you have set up the local sever for Apache and MySQL databases, you will be able to create WordPress on Mac, create Joomla on Mac, or any other websites you like.
Note: If you can’t start Apache on Mac, try to disable Web sharing from System Preferences… >> Internet & Wireless >> Sharing. If you are on OS X Mountain Lion, you may need to turn off Apache before starting MAMP.
You can now launch MAMP from Applications » MAMP.
From the above main MAMP screen, you will need to make some basic configurations to set up the local server environment including Apache, PHP, server ports, database server. Click the“Preferences” button you will get a new popup dialogue with options including: Start/stop, Ports, PHP and Apache.
Start/stop Settings:
Here you have the option to control when to start and stop local servers on your Mac computer. We suggest you to enable Start Servers when starting MAMP and Stop Servers when quitting MAMP. So each time you start MAMP, the local Apache server automatically starts on your Mac, when you close the MAMP app, you shut down the Apache server at the same time.
You can disable the check for Pro version and the start page option. The start page option can be set to your local WordPress directory, so when you start MAMP, you open your local WordPress on Mac at the same time. If you leave it to the default directory, the MAMP start page will provide you easy access to services and features such as phpMyAdmin which we will discuss in details below.
Ports Setting:
The default port number would be 8888 for Apache port, and 8889 for MySQL port. Usually you do not need to change them. If you like to custom the port numbers, make sure they are not taken by other apps on your Mac computer. If the ports are available, you can also set them to the default Apache and SQL ports on live web server on the internet.
(note: if you leave the Apache port to the default 8888, then your local site can only be visited with URL http://localhost:8888/; on the contrary, if you change it to the default Apache port 80, you can directly visit http://localhost without the port number attached. A disadvantage of using port 80 is that you need to enter your admin password each time your start your local servers created by the MAMP tool.)
PHP Settings:
MAMP offers two different PHP versions in MAMP 3.0 for Mac. Choose the latest PHP version for maximum compatiblities with your local web applications, also higher security and more stable performance when the local sites being migrated to live server.
Apache Settings:
This is the place to set, choose or change the document root directory of your local web applications or sites on Mac hard drive. You can click the Select… button to pick up the target local site installation folder location on Mac.
Up until now, you have successfully installed MAMP on Mac and you have configured your local Apache server on Mac with supportive settings. You can go to build your local websites with MAMP now. However if your website requires MySQL databases as well, such as the famous WordPress and Joomla, you need to create databases with MAMP. See how to install WordPress on Mac with MAMP? Please refer to below steps to set up local MySQL server on Mac with MAMP.
![Mamp download mac Mamp download mac](/uploads/1/2/6/5/126595834/553034641.jpg)
Create a Database on Mac with MAMP
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/6/5/126595834/534904049.png)
Mamp Download Mac Installer
To create a local MySQL database on Mac, you can make use of the phpMyAdmin tool which comes with MAMP by default.
From the above main MAMP screen, click Open start page button, click on phpMyAdmin, you will be taken to a new screen where you are given the option to manage databases for your local sites on Mac. You will be able to create MySQL database with the phpMyAdmin tool on Mac.
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Go to localhost. In the Create Database field, enter a name for the database. No spaces. In the Collation list, select utf8_general_ci. Then click Create button, your MySQL databaseon local Mac OS X will be created!
In above steps, we have set up the Apache server environment on our local Mac computer, we have set up Apache, enabled PHP and then create MySQL database. It is time to start the local website building on your Mac computer.
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Update Jun 2018: this article was originally published in Jul 2014 and has since been updated.