Last night there were several brownouts, which may or may not affected how my laptop slept. A rare sleep disorder causes problems when waking up: Right after opening my machine, it spontaneously reboots rather than, er, staying awake. This occurred only once or twice in the past year, but when it did, MAMP passed away into a zombie state. I couldn’t stop the servers; nor could I start them! Its Dashboard widget just spun and spun and spun, and I couldn’t access my local WordPress or Zenphoto installations; nor could I access the MAMP start page or phpMyAdmin. Shutting down my MacBook Pro and restarting it didn’t help either. Time to research and document the problem. 
It turns out that this is a known bug, and that it’s on the MAMP developer list to fix. Even better, there’s a workaround:
- Start the MAMP application (something I rarely do), located in
/Applications/MAMP/MAMP.app. The start page will open a new web browser page, but will fail to connect, which is expected since it’s in an unhappy state. - Click the Preferences button.
- In the resulting Preferences sheet, don’t change anything. Just click the OK button.
- Results: The Apache and MySQL servers will stop and restart. Correctly, this time, rather than spinning infinitely. To make sure things are working, click the Open Start Page button; the MAMP start page should then load in a new browser page.
- If the Dashboard widget still continues to spin, just click its Stop Servers button, wait for the servers to stop completely, then click Start Servers.
I still use MAMP v1.7, but I’m guessing that the current version 1.7.1, released sometime late last year, also has this bug.
Before I applied the above workaround, I saw the following in the Console, while tracking systemp.log as I (unsuccessfully) attempted to stop and restart via the MAMP Dashboard widget:
2/18/08 11:11:27 AM authexec[224] executing /bin/sh
2/18/08 11:11:30 AM DashboardClient[141] apache didn’t stop -> kill
2/18/08 11:11:30 AM [0x0-0xb00b].com.apple.dock[111]
2008-02-18 11:11:30.463 DashboardClient[141:10b] apache didn’t stop -> kill
2/18/08 11:11:30 AM authexec[229] executing /bin/kill
2/18/08 11:11:30 AM [0x0-0xb00b].com.apple.dock[111] kill: 272: No such process
2/18/08 11:11:35 AM [0x0-0xb00b].com.apple.dock[111] /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at ‘localhost’ failed
2/18/08 11:11:35 AM [0x0-0xb00b].com.apple.dock[111] error: ‘Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock’ (61)’
2/18/08 11:11:35 AM [0x0-0xb00b].com.apple.dock[111] Check that mysqld is running and that the socket: ‘/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock’ exists!
The message about failing to connect to localhost caught my attention, and searching for those terms in the MAMP forums yielded the workaround. After things got back into a happier working condition, I skimmed to find the message below, confirming that things (or, at least MySQL) are running:
Feb 18 11:49:36 Macintosh-2 [0x0-0x26026].com.living-e.MAMP[290]: Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql
Sure enough, Apache, MySQL and PHP run fine now: I can use WordPress and Zenphoto again, as well as access phpMyAdmin.
21 comments
This was hugely useful - just happened to me today! Thanks.
Glad it helped, Chris!
Had never experienced this until today, and was so grateful to find this. Thank you!
Thankfully, found this post via http://www.ancientwisdompro.com/blog/archives/214 before ripping out too many clumps of my hair. Thanks SO much!
Thanx… MAMP stayed open I think when my MAC crashed, and I couldn’t restart Apache & MYSQL. Works perfectly now!
Awesome. thanks!
Thankyou *so* much for posting this… I’ve had this MAMP problem repeatedly over the past couple of weeks since switching back to mac (yay) and it was driving me nuts! Feeling much better now. Aaaaahhhh.
thanks!very useful…
(not the same person as the last Kevin
I have had this problem intermittently over the last year or so. I always ended up uninstalling and reinstalling MAMP to try to fix the problem. THANK YOU for this workaround as it saved me the headache of backing up all of my files before re-installing.
That’s awesome. I just got the error.
Great tip… but it didn’t work for me. I think I might have killed my MAMP Apache installation!
I had been playing with the allow/deny directives in httpd.conf, and stopping and starting the servers quite a bit.
Now only MySQL will start, and even with this trick, Apache refuses to do anything.
:o(
Does anyone have any ideas?
Me again. I’ve figured it out!
I also checked my Console, which told me I had a syntax error in my httpd.conf file.
I had:
Order allow,deny
Allow from 123.456.78.90
Deny all
instead of:
Order allow,deny
Allow from 123.456.78.90
Deny from all
It’s always something simpe! Time for a cup of coffee, I think.
Thanks again for the great workaround.
Hi Francis, thanks for the tip! Especially if I find myself needing to configure the httpd.conf in MAMP.
Hi again
I am enjoying my noob Unix adventure… I have found that it was necessary to add the subnet mask address and the localhost address to my whitelist, to make sure things work.
So now, my directive looks like this:
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 123.456.78.90/255.255.255.0
Allow from 127.0.0.1
That means that only I can see stuff.
I just need to add another “Allow from… ” line for a different IP address.
Great!
Big help - thank you!
–
MAMP 1.7.1
Mac OS X 10.5.3
MacBook 2.4 GHz
Thank you, I was already dreading spending my afternoon on hunting a fix to this rather than doing the work I’m supposed to be doing.
BRILLIANT!!!!!!!!! Thanks so much!
Thanks. Worked like a charm.
Great tip!
Thanks but didn’t work. MYSQL won’t start.
I never associated a power cut with my MAMP issue until reading your article. My MAMP is broken AGAIN for the fourth time this year, sure enough we had a power cut this morning. This workaround has saved me yet another complete re-install - thanks
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