Migrating from MAMP to Homebrew

February 15, 2013

I’ve been using MAMP (the free version, not MAMP Pro) on my local machine for development and testing for a long time, mostly out of laziness. FuelPHP’s oil utility does not work well with MAMP’s MySQL, however, so today I decided it was finally time to switch to using homebrew-installed MySQL and PHP and OSX 10.8’s included Apache.

It was generally painless (I used these instructions and this blog post about enabling Apache on Mountain Lion) but I didn’t want to have to recreate all of my local databases. Some Googling only turned up the location of MAMP Pro’s database files. I found the files for regular MAMP at /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql/ and moved them to /usr/local/var/mysql/ and everything was good to go.

While researching this, I also came across this blog post explaining a setup that automatically makes each folder in your Sites directory available at <foldername>.dev and set that up as well. It’s awesome. No more editing my hosts file and Apache config!