I’ve swapped over to MAMP for my local web development needs on OSX. I work with a variety of projects that require different versions of PHP, and MAMP allows me to change the PHP version quickly and easily. It also comes with a preconfigured MySQL instance for my database needs.
By default, XDebug is not enabled in MAMP. I found plenty of MAMP Pro posts on how to setup XDebug, but not for simple MAMP. Here’s what you need to do.
Really the only trick to know is that MAMP keeps two configuration files for each PHP version. One serves as a template when you start up PHP. There are two files you need to edit:
/Applications/MAMP/conf/php\[version]/php.ini
/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php\[version]/conf/php.ini
In both of these files, go down to the very bottom of the config file, where the [xdebug] section is, and uncomment ( remove the ; ) zend_extension line. In addition, add the following lines:
xdebug.remote_autostart=1 xdebug.remote_enable=1 xdebug.remote_host=localhost xdebug.remote_port=9000 xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
The final result will look something like this:
[xdebug] zend_extension="/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.4.34/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20100525/xdebug.so" xdebug.remote_autostart=1 xdebug.remote_enable=1 xdebug.remote_host=localhost xdebug.remote_port=9000 xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
Restart MAMP (or launch it if you haven’t done so yet) and XDebug should be all set for whatever environment you use!
Hope this helps!