How To Install Joomla Locally On A Mac Computer With MAMP

In order to run Joomla on a Mac computer, you will first need to download a program called MAMP. MAMP is a local version of Apache, My SQL, and PHP, similar to software that an actual web server (Godaddy) would use to host your Joomla site live. You can download MAMP here. If you are using Windows, you will need to download WAMP. If you are using Linux, you will need to download LAMP.

The MAMP file is a 163MB zip file, so it may take a while. After it has completed downloading, double click to unzip it using your Mac's Archive Utility.

MAMP is very easy to install. Open up the Finder and navigate to your applications folder. From here, simply drag the MAMP folder you just unzipped into your applications folder.

Now, you will need to launch MAMP. Do so by double clicking the MAMP icon (the elephant). This icon will be located within the MAMP folder. You should now have two MAMP windows opened on your Mac. The first will be the MAMP Apache and My SQL toggle. The second will be a Safari page called "Welcome to MAMP". This second page is where you will control all files being used by MAMP.

From the second window (Welcome to MAMP), click the phpMy Admin tab located on the top toolbar. You should now see two sections, MySQL and phpMyAdmin. Under the MySQL section, type joomla into the Create new database field and click create. You can minimize this window for now.

You can get a direct download of the latest Joomla release from the official Joomla website, or by clicking here. The Joomla download is only 6.7MB so it should only take a couple minutes to download. After the download is complete, double click the Joomla file to unzip it using your Mac's Archive Utility. Upon unzipping, there should now be a Joomla folder located in your downloads folder, or desktop, depending on where you save your downloads to.

Open up a Finder window and navigate: Finder - Applications - MAMP - htdocs. Now, drag the Joomla file you just unzipped into the htdocs folder. After that is done, you can close Finder.

Joomla should now be ready for setup. Open up a new Safari window and type http://localhost:8888/ into the URL bar. Hit enter to navigate to the page. Within this window, you should see the Joomla folder that you created. Click it. You should now be in the Joomla setup window.

As you can see, there are 7 basic steps to installing Joomla. All of these steps are very simple and just require you to fill in basic information. You will not need to do anything major, as this is an auto-installer. However, the fourth step is important. Use these setting for the fourth step.

Host: localhost

[Port: 8889]

User: root

Password: root

Proceed through the additional three steps and you should be done. That's all there is to it. You should now have Joomla installed locally on you computer through MAMP.