A few days ago I wrote about hosting a website from your home but in Singapore, if you have a residential broadband connection, you can’t legally host a website from your computer. Which means that the only reason anyone would want to have all the web serving software installed in their computer would be to “check out” or develop content locally, on the computer, before uploading to the webserver. That being the case, I can understand why most people wouldn’t ever want to go through the hassle of installing PHP, MySQL, Apache, PHPMyadmin etc.

Luckily, there is a quick-and-easy solution for people with little time like you and I.

MAMP stands for Macintosh Apache MySQL and PHPMyadmin. Essentially, all you need to do is download a (rather big) package file, drag the decompressed folder to Applications, double-click the executable and…voila! You have everything set up! No files to edit and no command-line madness to deal with. Doesn’t interfere with any existing PHP etc installation either. No good for actual file serving, but then that’s not what MAMP is for.

I wish I’d found this sooner.

But how about Windows-using folks? The equivalent seems to be EasyPHP. This installation guide should prove useful for those who’d like to try it out.