XAMPP on Mac OS X

I use XAMPP heavily on Windows.  It’s my primary development environment because XAMPP is easy to use and cheaper then using dedicated hosting for testing sites and blogs.  I don’t need anything to do a lot of heavy lifting and XAMPP handles everything I throw at it.  Is XAMPP on Mac OS X?  I was about to find out.

Recently I received a new MacBook for Christmas and I wanted to move all of my develpment stuff over to Mac OS X.  I am going to keep my Windows system as my gaming machine, since I love computer gaming.  It’s a hobby, and doesn’t take up as much time as it did years ago, but I want to move my “professional hobby” to my Mac and keep the Windows XP system as my gaming rig since it was built for that purpose.

I digress.

I started looking for solutions on how to run Apache and MySQL on OSX.  There are plenty of articles out on the Internet to do so but I didn’t want to run Apache natively.  Not really any particular reason, I just didn’t want to install it as a daemon.

First I ran across MAMP, which looked good, but they want you to PAY for MAMP Pro.  No thanks.  I’d rather not fork over money when I can save it for food.

XAMPP On Mac OS X

I decided to check if XAMPP works on OSX and it does!  Yes, yes, my precious, it does.  I downloaded the .dmg for XAMPP on Mac OSX and proceeded to mount the image and run the install.  In minutes I was up and running.  I copied my web folder over for my latest development WordPress blog, edited the wp-config.php file and fired up the install.php page.

Boom.  Error.  Gnashing of teeth, I hacked at it for a few minutes and realized that when I copied the files I didn’t do it as “nobody” of the “admin” group.

If you have this problem, simply go to the directory that has incorrect permissions and use the “chown” command to change the owner.

> chown -R nobody:admin “/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/htdocs/website_folder”

Now, that issue was quickly fixed but when I would access the install.php URL (http://sitename/wp-admin/install.php) I still could not connect.  I searched for hours, reviewed the configuration in phpMyAdmin and got really frustrated.  I took an afternoon to think.

After looking at it again, I realized that it was properly database permissions still, so I fired up phpMyAdmin again and looked.  The user account for the database was allowed to connect from “%” which is a wildcard in MySQL that means any host can connect with the user ID.  On a whim I changed this to “localhost” and it worked like a champ.  I changed it back to “%” and failed.

Now maybe this is a bug, but I verified my Windows XAMPP load and it was setup using “%” for all of the test databases.  I’m chalking this up to a “feature” on Mac OSX for now.  Other than those issues, I’ve had no problems running XAMPP on OS X.  It works great.