The Red Frog Blog

MAMP is an awesome program that allows you to install Apache, MySQL and PHP with just a few clicks on Mac OS X. It’s a really easy way to set up a local development environment, or to get a dynamic website running a laptop (which is something we recently had to do for a client).

Apparently there’s a bug in the current version (1.7.1) that causes MAMP to stop working even though the MAMP window reports Apache and MySQL running with a green light. When you try to load up pages in a browser you’ll get an unable to connect message like “Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at localhost:8888“. Stopping and starting the Apache and MySQL services doesn’t fix the problem and even restarting your Mac doesn’t help! You may not even be able to get MAMP to stop running. Here’s how to fix the bug…

The solution is rather simple:

Open the MAMP preferences window. Make no changes, just click OK. The servers will stop and restart. Fixed!

It’s that simple, but who would have thought that would solve the problem? I’ll tell you who… thanks to Sairuh at Iwaruna.com for pointing out the fix. Sairuh also points out that it’s a known bug and it’s on the developers list to fix. MAMP is a really great application and I would definately recommend it despite this known bug!