Local Development using MAMP

When I’m devel­op­ing a Web site some­times I will take my ini­tial devel­op­ment local and run a local server. Obvi­ously for projects already online or projects that do not require full data­base inte­gra­tion I do not need to run one all of the time. This is where MAMP comes into play, or if you run Win­dows WAMP* would be your flavor.

What exactly do these terms mean? The M and W stand for your work­ing plat­form by way of Mac­in­tosh or Win­dows and the AMP stands for Apache, MySQL and PHP. These sim­ple apps can start and stop the full suite of host­ing tools at a moments notice with­out you hav­ing to muck around in your sys­tem and install all sorts of tools that require more in depth con­fig­u­ra­tion. I’ve found that over­all this can speed up pro­gram­ming and test­ing because you will not need to con­stantly upload files to an FTP server and check them that way, instead you would just save and refresh your browser.

And it would be sort of open-source blas­phemy if I didn’t men­tion XAMPP mainly used for Linux, but also con­tain­ing fla­vors of Mac OS X, Win­dows and even Solaris.

All of these soft­ware pack­ages are free, or have a free (lite) ver­sion avail­able for you to use in your pro­gram­ming endeav­ors so have at it!

*Win­dows & WAMP makes the assump­tion that you are devel­op­ing a PHP/MySQL Web site and not a .NET Solution

Update: I have moved from MAMP to XAMPP for local devel­op­ment, it’s a lit­tle more flex­i­ble for my usage.