Drupal 6 on Mac OS X: The Secret is MAMP

Setting up Drupal 6 on OS X Leopard

Author: M Butcher
Date: 2008-06-17 14:27:55 -0400

Working on OS X is a real pleasure. It took only a few minutes to get Rails running. Apache isn't hard either. But OS X comes with its share of annoyances, the two biggest of which are:

1. The version of PHP that ships with OS X is nearly crippled.
2. MySQL, in spite of being heavily promoted by Apple, does not come pre-installed.

To get around the first, I've changed some of my applications to not make use of "missing" PHP features. But this has been an irritating process.

To get around the second, I simply installed the MySQL server. But it still feels foreign.

For the most part, my solutions have worked fine for my own development. But then I tried to install Drupal 6. The install worked okay... but there is no GD library support in OS X's PHP. And what does "no GD support" mean? It means no image functions.

No GD support? Does that not seem weird?

My initial solution was to start rebuilding PHP (along with the dependencies for GD). But as I started along that road, I started to realize that I was committing to maintaining a fork. Every time a new Apache upgrade comes out, I have to rebuild. How many hours of my life might I lose to this process?

That's when I happened upon MAMP. MAMP is a Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP stack for OS X. It provides prebuilit software complete with a web management interface, a desktop application for launching, and even a dashboard widget.

(The web interface comes full of built-in goodies like phpMyAdmin and a similar application for SQLite.)

It took me a minute to install. With the click of a button, I reconfigured MySQL to listen on the standard port (by default, it's set to listen on some astronomically high port). After finding the configuration files in /Applications/MAMP/Conf, I gave the PHP instance enough memory to comfortably run Drupal... and that was it.

MAMP doesn't replace the Apache that comes with OS X. Instead, it install a parallel version. Likewise, since MySQL and PHP are installed in the Applications directory, they don't interfere with other installations, either.

Coming from a Linux background, I find it mildly irritating that I have to maintain two copies of the same programs just because the main one is broken... but I think the Living-E poeple (the folks behind MAMP) made the right decision in not trying to replace the originals.

At the end of the day, I'm happy to have my (mostly) fully featured AMP stack (PHP is still missing DBA). I'm even more satisfied that I now have my local Drupal instance up and running -- just in time to start on the new book on Drupal and JavaScript.