The simplest way to develop a Joomla! site on your local Mac OS X computer is by using MAMP. MAMP is short for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, PHP. MAMP works just like an application. It is released under the GNU General Public License. You can download MAMP from Living-e AG. The download page can be found HERE.

Current MAMP versions require Mac OS X 10.4.x. If you're running Mac OS X 10.3.x you can download an earlier version of MAMP 1.4.1 (universal binary), for Intel and PowerPC.

Previously this site covered installing Joomla! 1.0x in the MAMP environment on your computer. Now that Joomla! 1.5 is available as a stable release you may want to install version 1.5 site on your Macintosh computer using MAMP. The two versions of Joomla! install methods are very similar but there are changes to Joomla! 1.5 that you can get familiar with here.

As of this writing MAMP is a Universal Binary version 1.7.1. The download is a 127 MB disk image. There is also a MAMP Pro version that you can read about HERE. This article will deal with the regular and free version of MAMP.

MAMP is installed on your computer in your 'Applications' Folder. In order to work properly the MAMP folder must be located in the Applications folder. You should also have at least 250 MB of free space on your hard drive.

Once MAMP is installed on your Mac you are now ready to install Joomla! 1.5. Get the latest full install of Joomla! from joomla.org. On the home page of joomla.org There is usually a banner with a button to download Joomla! When you click that download button you may be taken to a page which offers a couple of compressed install package options. The install packages come compressed as a .zip, .tar.gz, and .tar.bz2 compression. Your Macintosh OSX computer can deal with any of these compressions. Pick the one of your choosing and download that to your computer.

Let's say that you chose the .tar.gz package. Your download will likely be called 'Joomla_1.5.3-Stable-Full_Package.tar.gz'. Note that '1.5.3' will change as newer releases of Joomla! are made available. Uncompress this package on your hard drive by double clicking it. Your Mac OS X computer will expand the package into a folder with all the folders and files inside that you require for your install.

You can change that expanded folder name into something simpler like Joomla153 for instance. That's what we'll use for this article. Move this entire Joomla153 folder and its contents to the MAMP application and put it inside the folder called 'htdocs'. The path to the 'htdocs' folder will be /Applications/MAMP/htdocs.