XAMPP or MAMP on Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard) [closed]

Question

I just bought a new MacBook Pro which comes with Snow Leopard 10.6.2 (Mac OS X 10.6.2). I am used to using XAMPP as my local development server on XP. Since Mac OS X is based on Unix, I was thinking on activating/installing all the necessary stuff as I would normally do on Linux. However, I am not quite ready to be playing around with the system at this point so having an external package would be a nice temporary solution I think.

The question is whether I should go with MAMP or XAMPP. Does anybody have any suggestions? The Pro and Cons I suppose. As far as I know, Mac OS X comes with Apache2 and PHP5. Would MAMP or XAMPP modify the existing Apache and PHP installation? Any comments on how I should proceed?

PS: Eventually I would use the default installation of Apache and PHP, and install a binary package of MySQL but time for development is an essence and I don't have time to familiarize myself with Mac OS X.

Answer 1

XAMPP and MAMP are both quite similar. Neither touch your default OS X Apache/PHP! You can just try them both out and remove them afterwards by just deleting their folders. In the end they do exactly the same.

XAMPP gets updated more regularly and is generally more up to date. Also XAMPP has more extensions built-in.

On the other hand MAMP looks a little more mac-like and has a Dashboard Widget. But for a development system that doesn't count much. Unlike XAMPP, MAMP works without administrator privileges.

I went with XAMPP in the end because I needed the dba extension.

Answer 2

after using both to develop some Wordpress sites locally on my mac I chose to go with MAMP.

The main problem (only problem actually) I had with XAMPP was that it had issues on OS X with file and folder permissions. doing something as simple as installing new Themes using the Wordpress online interface proved nearly impossible - in the end it required changing permissions on some of the Apache configuration files in the XAMPP dir. - even then it didn't entirely work.

I won't go into details - but suffice it to say I ended up thinking "why bother?" and just went back to MAMP.

that's just my experience mind you - but it is worth noting that it's so common that there are several sites/blog posts whose sole topic is how to fix this issue. just google "XAMPP Wordpress theme install problem" or something like that and you'll see what I mean.