How to Install WordPress on Your Mac Using MAMP

Your Very Own Private WordPress Using MAMP

 

What in the world is MAMP?

MAMP is actually an acronym that stands for MacIntosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP. MAMP is an application that packages all of these components together to make it possible to run WordPress on your computer without the need for a hosting service. Now, as you’ve probably guessed from reading what MAMP stands for, yes, it is for Mac computers only. There are other ways to install WordPress on your machine, but MAMP is by far the easiest solution.

Why would I want to install MAMP?

The greatest reason for installing MAMP is that it gives you a development and testing environment. Basically you can build your WordPress site and try different things out on it without fear of messing up your actual site that is live on the web. Different layouts, themes, and plugins can all be installed and tested to make sure you get the look and functionality that you want.

 

Step #1

Begin by downloading MAMP from their website. You can follow this link or type the following URL into your web browsers address bar. http://www.mamp.info/en/downloads/index.html

You will see a link to download MAMP and MAMP Pro. Go ahead and click this link and begin your download. The file should be MAMP_MAMP_PRO_2.0.3.zip. The numbers may be different if they have updated the version since I wrote this.

Once the download is finsihed, double click the .zip file and drag the icon for MAMP over to your application folder. That’s it. It is now installed.

Double click on the MAMP icon that you just dragged over to your application folder. You should the following screen pop up on your screen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then shortly after you should see this screen open up in your web browser.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This means that you have a successful installation of MAMP.

Step #2

Click the “Preferences” button on the MAMP window and then click on “Start/Stop”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Under this preference I like to make sure that the servers will start everytime I start MAMP and I also disable showing the Startup page.

Step #3

Now click on the “Ports” button.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s perfectly okay to leave the default values. If you leave “8888” as the port number for Apache you will not be prompted for a system password everytime you try to

access your local site, but you will have to include this port number in the URL. For example, you will have to to type “http://localhost:8888”.

If you change the port number to “80”, you will be able to access your site by simply typing “http://localhost”, but you will be prompted for your system password everytime.

For this installation, leave the port number at 8888.

Step #4

Next up is “PHP”. Go ahead and click on this button.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On this setting, I would recommend leaving the default values.

Step #5

Last but not least, click on the “Apache” button.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is where you will set the location of your WordPress site. As you can see in this screenshot, I have my WordPress installation in /Users/JayZee/Desktop/Website Stuff/wordpress.

To make things easy. Go ahead and download the latest version of WordPress and unzip the file that you download. Then set this path to that folder that you unzipped and click OK.

Step #6 Creating Your Database

After you start MAMP, your servers should automatically start. You can see if they have by looking for the green light next to each server name. If they have not started, click the “Start Servers” button.

If you decided to disable the Startup Page, you will have to click the “Open Startup Page” button. You should be taken to the page when it opens in your web browser.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once here, click on the phpMyAdmin tab at the top of the page. You should see the following screen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Go ahead and type a name for your database in the text provided and then click “Create”.

Step #7 Installing WordPress

So, you should have already downloaded WordPress and unzipped the download into a folder and MAMP should already be looking at this folder for the WordPress installation files which was described in Step #5.

If not, go back to Step #5 and configure the path to point to this unzipped folder.

Open up your web browser and type “http://localhost:8888”. This will begin WordPress’ famous 5-minute install.

When you see the screen that prompts you for information. Enter as follows:

databasename = (whatever name you created in Step #6)

database host/server = localhost

database user = root

password = root

 

Once you have completed that, enter a blog name and an email address. You are now ready to start developing and testing.

Final Words

From now on everytime you want to run WordPress on your computer, simply click on the MAMP application, wait for the servers to start and then type “http://localhost:8888” into your web browser. If you need to log in to the admin console, simply type “http://localhost:8888/wp-admin”. Once there you can type your username and password to begin using WordPress.

Like I said earlier, MAMP is a great way to test and develop your WordPress site. It works just like your live site. You can download themes and plugins and test them to make sure they will provide the look and function that you are after. You can also play around with customizing your theme without damaging your real site.

You can view the video tutorial here.

 

 

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