Building the MAMP stack (php, apache & mysql) on Apple Silicon ARM (native)

In this tutorial, we'll build the the nescessary packages for ARM via homebrew. After that we'll configure apache2 for using virtual hosts. The native php is ofcourse way faster, see the results of this benchmark below.

TEST NAME	SECONDS	OP/SEC
Rosetta2	191.654 sec	1.96 MOp/s
Intel i7-4790K (imac 2014)	156.791 sec	2.39 MOp/s
Intel i5-8500B (mini 2018)	141.381 sec	2.65 MOp/s
ARM m1	43.745 sec	8.58 MOp/s

Installing homebrew

cd ~
mkdir homebrew && curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C homebrew
sudo mv homebrew /opt/homebrew

This way homebrew will be installed to the /opt/homebrew folder. We can then initiate homebrew by cd to that directory and run brew in the bin folder.

cd /opt/homebrew/bin
./brew update

If not installed already, the system will ask to install the command-line tools for developers for you. Go ahead.

Now add the homebrew/bin directory to your path by editing/creating a .zshrc file in your home directory.

nano ~/.zshrc

export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH"

Build the packages

Note: checkout this comment if you have problems building python.

brew install -s mysql [email protected] httpd

This might take some time (30mins) or so. When everything is done it will list some next steps like adding the php module to apache.

Configuration

Make life a bit easier by symlinking the config directories to a rememberable path:

mkdir ~/MAMP
mkdir ~/MAMP/www
ln -s /opt/homebrew/etc/httpd ~/MAMP/httpd
ln -s /opt/homebrew/etc/php/7.4 ~/MAMP/php

Now, let's add some scripts to this directory

nano ~/MAMP/start.sh

start.sh:

#!/bin/zsh

brew services start mysql
brew services start [email protected]
brew services start httpd

stop.sh:

#!/bin/zsh

brew services stop mysql
brew services stop [email protected]
brew services stop httpd

restart.sh:

#!/bin/zsh

brew services restart mysql
brew services restart [email protected]
brew services restart httpd

Make 'em writable:

chmod +x ~/MAMP/start.sh
chmod +x ~/MAMP/stop.sh
chmod +x ~/MAMP/restart.sh

Oke, lets configure apache/httpd for usage with php and enable mod_rewrite along the way:

nano ~/MAMP/httpd/httpd.conf

Uncomment:

# LoadModule rewrite_module lib/httpd/modules/mod_rewrite.so

Change the DocumentRoot:

DocumentRoot "/Users/{username}/MAMP/www"
<Directory "/Users/{username}/MAMP/www">

And add the following to the bottom:


LoadModule php7_module /opt/homebrew/opt/[email protected]/lib/httpd/modules/libphp7.so

<FilesMatch \.php$>
    SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>

Include /opt/homebrew/etc/httpd/vhosts/*.conf

Now create a directory named vhosts

mkdir ~/MAMP/httpd/vhosts

Addding a website / virtual host

mkdir ~/MAMP/www/dev.example.com
mkdir ~/MAMP/www/dev.example.com/public_html
mkdir ~/MAMP/www/dev.example.com/logs

nano ~/MAMP/httpd/vhosts/dev.example.com.conf

Add:

<VirtualHost *:8080>
    DocumentRoot "/Users/{username}/MAMP/www/dev.example.com/public_html"
    ServerName dev.example.com
    ErrorLog "/Users/{username}/MAMP/www/dev.example.com/logs/error.log"
    CustomLog "/Users/{username}/MAMP/www/dev.example.com/logs/custom.log" common
</VirtualHost>

<Directory /Users/{username}/MAMP/www/dev.example.com/public_html>
        Options FollowSymLinks Includes
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
</Directory>

Add dev.example.com to your hosts file

echo '127.0.0.1 dev.example.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Now restart:

~/MAMP/restart.sh

Troubleshooting

Check the output of the following commands:

sudo apachectl start

If you have see a message saying something like Address already in use: AH00072: make_sock: could not bind to address, try changing the Listen config in httpd.conf to:

Listen 0.0.0.0:8080

Check if your config is valid:

apachectl configtest

Vist http://dev.example.com:8080