To MAMP PRO or Not
UPDATE 10/13/2009 - This past weekend, I played around with XAMPP for Mac and it runs great! I retract all the mean things (“clunky”) I said about it below. MAMP is already OFF my Macbook and I’m using XAMPP. Setup was a breeze, customized the PHP.INI file, and off we go!
ORIGINAL ENTRY:
Two colleagues of mine setup a Mac OS X Leopard server with Apache/MySQL/PHP running on it but then left…leaving me with a server I wasn’t sure how to administer. The problem is a simple one. While I’m familiar with how to do the upgrade of PHP/MySQL on different platforms, I haven’t a clue how to do it on Mac OS X.
As such, I started looking for an easy way to set up a working environment. Past experience had introduced me to MAMP, which I use to backup my Wordpress and Moodle environments on my Mac…think of it as a XAMPP for Mac (careful, there is a XAMPP for Mac) but easier and less clunky than XAMPP for Mac (although I think XAMPP for Linux and Windows is just great!).
My first thought was to rely on MAMP PRO, where M=Mac, A=Apache, M=MySQL, and P=PHP. But in various places I’d read, there were always always reservations about using such a system…apparently, it’s for development not production due to security issues. The MAMP Pro version comes with this software:
I decided to write to MAMP PRO folks and ask them what they thought…here was their response:
First of all: MAMP PRO isn’t a production server. It can be used as a web server but there are at least the following points to consider:
1. The web server is as secure or less as the system that it is running on.
2. Don’t run your web server on a machine containing sensible data.
3. Backup your important data on regular basis.
4. Take care that your system is up to date.
5. Control logs on regular basis.
6. Run Apache/MySQL servers as user www/mysql.
7. Change the MySQL root password to something else than “root”.
8. Activate “Allow local access only” in the MySQL tab.
9. Set permissions as restricted as possible.
System security isn’t a simple task. You have to calculate the risk and handle appropriately.
On that note, $55 doesn’t seem like too high a price to pay to get Apache, MySQL/PHP working on a Mac server. Now, how do I convince folks to buy software where the vendor is based out of Germany?!?
A follow-up question I have for the MAMP PRO support folks is this one:
If I run MAMP PRO on my Mac OS X Leopard server, will it still be able to serve up Apple Blogs/Wikis, or will that disappear?
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