Its not quite ready for public consumption yet but I can say that its one of most exciting things we’ve built with Wordpress to date.

Things are pretty secret at the moment but as we get closer to launching we will be posting more about our evolvement.

Mamp is an awesome one click solution to setting up an Apache, Mysql, Php web server on your Mac. It’s very easy to install and there is plenty of information on the Mamp documentation pages so I won’t go into that here, instead lets dive straight into the tips.

1. Access Mamp’s mysql from the Terminal

Being able to work with mysql through the terminal is very useful, especially when working with large databases that cause phpmyadmin to time out etc. However by default you can only access Leopards built in mysql install and not Mamps, the trick is to symlink the Mamp mysql install to you default mysql.sock location you do this by entering the following lines in the terminal one by one.

sudo mkdir /var/mysql

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

sudo chown _mysql /var/mysql/mysql.sock

sudo chmod 777 /var/mysql/mysql.sock

Don’t forget to restart Mamp afterwards for this to take effect, see this great mysql cheat sheet for a list of useful commands. As a bonus mysql gui applications like Cocoamysql Sequel Pro should now work with the Mamp mysql install as well.

2. Protect your files and databases from Mamp upgrades

By default Mamp stores all your website files in the /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ folder and all your database files in the /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql/ folder, this is fine until you come to upgrade MAMP, if you download a new version and  drag it to your Applications folder replacing the old version all your sites and databases will be lost, imagine how annoying that would be.

Now you could remember to first copy you htdocs and mysql folder to your desktop before you upgrade and then copy back afterwards, but thats a pain. A better way is to store them somewhere else permanently and use symlinks to point Mamp to the new locations. On my setup I have all my website files in my ~/Sites/ folder and all the databases in ~/Databases/. Now when a new version of MAMP is released I can upgrade safe in the knowledge that nothing important is going to be lost.

• Shut Down Mamp
• Manually copy the contents of the htdocs folder to ~/Sites
• Manually copy the contents of the db/mysql folder to ~/Databases
• Delete the htdocs and db/mysql from inside the MAMP folder
• Run the following terminal commands to create the symlinks

  ln -s ~/Databases /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql

  ln -s ~/Sites /Applications/MAMP/htdocs

• Restart Mamp

Everything should work as it did before. Next time you upgrade Mamp you will need to recreate the symlinks as they will be overwritten by the default Mamp db and htdocs folders. Another nice benefit to having the folders exist outside of Mamp is that you can easily use them with other programs as well. For example I have mine symlinked into my Dropbox so that my sites are synced between my macs.

3. Free up space by deleting mysql binary log files

Mysql saves old log files in a binary format, after prolonged use these files can become huge and by default Mamp does not auto delete them. When I checked my Mamp folder recently there were over 30gb of log files, what a waste of space.

Freeing up space by deleting them is easy and safe. To clean up your binary log files log into mysql via the terminal:

mysql -u root -p

Type your password and then run the following command at the mysql> prompt:

If you dont have command line access or this doesn’t work for some reason you can also free up space by simply deleting the actual log files themselves. To do this navigate to your Mamp db/mysql folder and delete all the files ending in -bin.000001, -bin.000002, etc.

4. Use the Mamp Dashboard Widget

Mamp comes with a time saving dashboard widget that can be used to stop and start Mamp without having to have to main application open, great if you like to keep you dock uncluttered.

The widget can be found in the Mamp installation .dmg, just double click it to install. Once you have the widget installed there is no need to open the main Mamp app when you want to start / stop the server.