Installation is pretty straight-forward and not much different to any other typical LAMP application, but I found that my out-of-the box LAMP setup on OS X Leopard 10.5.6 was missing a few of the PHP modules required to install the app. For example I had the most recent version of the GD image library installed but the Magento installer insisted I needed something more.

I’m not a Linux guy and poking around under the hood of my OS isn’t something I’m busting to do but I had a crack at installing the missing modules using Fink. This seemed more straight-forward than installing packages via the command line, but I still didn’t like it, so I turned to MAMP.

MAMP I discovered, is great if you’re looking for a friendly interface to your Apache, PHP and MySql setup. I downloaded and installed MAMP Pro as it allows me to run multiples sites locally on my Mac and once it had installed, I only had a couple of bits to change.

Installing MAMP Pro

As I had already configured LAMP on my Mac, MAMP was set to use the ports 8888 and 8889 for Apache and MySql respectively, instead of the default ports 80 and 3306. Not a major issue but I’d rather just slap local.mysite.com into my browser than worry about local.mysite.com:8888. Perhaps I’m just lazy.

Error with the MySql –skip-federated option

The second problem I had was more fundamental: MySql refused to start up, complaining about an issue with an unknown option in the log:

[ERROR] /Applications/MAMP/Library/libexec/mysqld: unknown option '--skip-federated'

The solution to this I found, was simple. This option is set in the /etc/my.conf file and can be safely commented out. To fix this, you need to look for the following lines and add a # character to comment out the option and restart MAMP.

# Disable Federated by default
# skip-federated

Error connecting through socket

The final issue I found was to do with the MySql socket. MAMP has it’s own MySql install that was clashing with the one installed in my OSX installation, even though that one was not running:

ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock'

This was also easy to fix using the Terminal app. Simply login into your Terminal and run the following command:

sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

If you experience these issues installing MAMP, following these steps shouldsee you up and running with everything you need to install Magento Commerce.

With a little bit more digging around in the forums (by the way does anybody else find it frustrating that the forum search results show the same summary over and over again for in search results?!?) and a few dead-ends, I tracked the problem down to a PHP memory issue.

I’m running MAMP PRO which runs great on my Mac and made things far easier when I was trying to sort out the LAMP environment that comes with Leopard out of the box. However by default, the memory set in the PHP 5 template is too low for Magento Commerce to run and this was being reported in the PHP log (Log > PHP in the menu bar) in MAMP:

[18-Mar-2009 08:25:33] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in /Users/russ_back/Sites/magentocommerce.com/httpdocs/app/design/frontend/blank/default/template/page/2columns-right.phtml on line 55

As it turns out, this is an easy fix in MAMP and goes something like this. I’m assuming you’re using PHP5:

1. Open up MAMP Pro (or open your php5.ini file if you’re not using MAMP and skip to step 3).
2. Go to File > Edit Template > PHP5 php.ini (or hit cmd 4 if you’re after a shortcut). You may see a warning message but what we’re going to do is minor so you can read it and clear it for now.
3. Search for the “memory_limit” in the file and if you’ve never changed this, you may find it showing as 8M, which is 8Mb and too low for Magento Commerce.
4. Change this value to 16M – which is what Magento requires as a minimum – or preferably something higher, like 64M.
5. Hit File > Save and close the file.
6. Restart the Apache server (as simple as hitting the Stop and WebStart buttons in MAMP Pro) and then revisit your Magento location (mine’s at local.magentocommerce.com) and hit the refresh button of your browser
7. Wham! You’re done and Magento Commerce should be up and running