ASchroder.com

You need to run PHP 5.2.0 or newer for Magento. This is normally not a problem for MAMP but a recent reader has asked about determining which version is running on their Mac when this error does occur. I just wanted to make a quick post on checking PHP versions in MAMP, because it seems if your Mac has other versions of php installed you can end up having odd results when trying to run Magento in MAMP.

You can determine which PHP version your MAMP server is running by opening the MAMP ’start page’ and clicking the phpInfo link in the top menu. This will also tell you which php.ini file is being used.

You can also run:

 php -version

Run this in a terminal (Terminal.app), to print the PHP version that is on your PATH. You can determine which php is being run by typing:

which php

To find any php binaries on your Mac you can run the locate command in a terminal:

locate php | grep "[^\.]php$"

The pipe into grep just filters out any files that have php in the path, but are not php binaries, and also removes any files that are of the form filename.php which would otherwise turn up in the search.

You can execute any of the php binaries this command finds with the argument -version to find out what version of PHP it is. This may help you to identify any versions of PHP you have installed that you do not want anymore.

For example:

/usr/bin/php -version
/Applications/MAMP/bin/php4/bin/php -version

If anyone has any other tips for solving this or questions please post them below. Hopefully we can make sure this problem doesn’t trip anyone else up!

Coming from a Linux background, one of the things I didn’t like about MAMP was the way it hid away the mysql command line interface. Once you are comfortable using it, the CLI is a powerful and quick method of interacting with a mysql server. I just wanted to share a quick and easy way to access the MAMP mysql command line client on Mac OSX.

Firstly you can run the Mac OSX terminal easily by just typing:

ctrl + space bar (to access spotlight)

Then start typing ‘Terminal’ before you have even finished the little Apple gnomes will have guessed you want to open the Terminal (which of course you do). Start the Terminal by hitting enter when spotlight highlights the Terminal app.

Now that you are in a Terminal you are able to do all sorts of excellent things to your Mac. For now though, we’ll stick to running the mysql client. The client is located in /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin so to run it execute this command:

/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysql -uroot -p

Read more…

I’m writing a full series on setting up your Mac for Magnto ecommerce development, I should probably start with the first step – installing MAMP on a Leopard Mac, even if it’s a quite basic and hopefully self evident.

Maybe one of the less obvious things is that you do not need MAMP pro to get virtual hosting set up in Apache on a Mac, but it will require you to work with Apache config files as described in my post on setting up virtual hosts in apache on MAMP.

Read more…

When developing and testing a production Magento store locally it’s easy and convenient to set up an exact replica of the production environment. This can be achieved using Apache virtual hosting and your operating system hosts file.

This post will walk you through setting up a local testing Magento install for MAMP Leopard to include a virtual hosting configuration and how to configure your operating system to send requests for  your production site to your local testing environment.

Read more…