XAMPP or MAMP on Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard)

Question

I just bought a new MacBook Pro which comes with Snow Leopard 10.6.2 (Mac OS X 10.6.2). I am used to using XAMPP as my local development server on XP. Since Mac OS X is based on Unix, I was thinking on activating/installing all the necessary stuff as I would normally do on Linux. However, I am not quite ready to be playing around with the system at this point so having an external package would be a nice temporary solution I think.

The question is whether I should go with MAMP or XAMPP. Does anybody have any suggestions? The Pro and Cons I suppose. As far as I know, Mac OS X comes with Apache2 and PHP5. Would MAMP or XAMPP modify the existing Apache and PHP installation? Any comments on how I should proceed?

PS: Eventually I would use the default installation of Apache and PHP, and install a binary package of MySQL but time for development is an essence and I don't have time to familiarize myself with Mac OS X.

Answer 1

XAMPP and MAMP are both quite similar. Neither touch your default OS X Apache/PHP! You can just try them both out and remove them afterwards by just deleting their folders. In the end they do exactly the same.

XAMPP gets updated more regularly and is generally more up to date. Also XAMPP has more extensions build-in.

On the other hand MAMP looks a little more mac-like and has a Dashboard Widget. But for a development system that doesn't count much.

I went with XAMPP in the end because I needed the dba extension.

Answer 2

I am a new developer and run 10.6.3 as well. I found MAMP Pro to be a better option than anything else. The personal web server that comes with Mac is really handy but maintaining the modules via macports was a pain.

Versus XAMP, MAMP Pro works really well cause it lets you tweak the modules as you wish and edit the myself/postfix/httpd configs easily. The two biggest reasons I love it is cause of the easy dyndns integration.

As for the port number, you can just edit it to 80 and not have to enter it manually each time when you browse to your local dev site.