MacLochlainns Weblog

There’s so much energy that goes into blogging with big blog pages, I figured it was time to setup WordPress on my MacBook Pro MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) installation. That way, the world doesn’t need to know when I mess up a <div> tag.

The biggest benefit of creating a local blog becomes obvious when you start building your own plugins, templates, and themes. You also have the benefit of a built in backup if you post your work locally before moving it to your blog. Likewise, you can work on your blog when not connected to the network. By the way, thanks to Joel for pointing out that I forgot to say why this was important.

Here are the setup instructions for those interested in doing it too.

1. Download the software from WordPress.org by clicking their button or this one. If you need the tar.gz, click on the web site link.

2. When you download it, you’ll be prompted to open it. Choose to save it.

3. You’ll find it in your downloads folder, where you can double click it to launch the unzip process into a file folder. Mine happens on the desktop because it’s convenient.

4. After you’ve unzipped it into a folder. You drag it into your MAMP htdocs folder. You can check where the htdocs folder is by launching the MAMP application, and choosing Preferences.

In the preferences dialog, click the Apache tab, you’ll see where the htdocs folder location is. Mine is set to the default location.

5. After you drag the wordpress folder into the htdocs folder, you return to the MAMP application and click the Open start page button.

6. Click the phpMyAdmin link and create a database, like the screen shot.

After a moment, you should see that you’ve created a new database named WordPress.

7. Go to your /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/wordpress folder, and open up wp-config-sample.php file in a text editor. You should see the same lines 19, 22, and 25. The editor screen capture is from the TextMate editor.

Edit those lines to reflect your database name, and the root password. Naturally, if you’re concerned that your local host isn’t secure, you’ll need to purchase MAMP Pro to change your root password. You can’t change it in the free version.

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'WordPress');
 
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'root');
 
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'root');

After these changes, save the wp-config-sample.php file as wp-config.php in the same folder.

8. Enter the following in URL in your browser, and press the enter key.

http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

9. On the Welcome web page, enter your blog name and email (mine is omitted for obvious reasons). Click the Install WordPress button to proceed.

10. You’ll then be prompted with the admin user and a password. You should print it or copy it to your buffer because you’ll need it when you first login. Then, click the Log In button to proceed. You should probably change your password to something that you’ll remember before you do anything else.

11. You now have a complete localhost WordPress installation. Now, you can go to your real web accessible WordPress install and export your blog from the Tools menu. Then, on your localhost blog, you can import from the export file of your blog. If you’re using plugins (like anybody doesn’t), then copy the contents from the wp-content/plugins folder from your online blog to your local one; and then, activate them. You can snag your Akismet key from your online site too, but it is unlikely anybody will see your localhost blog.

Violà, c’est fine.

You can now access WordPress on your local machine by typing in the following URL:

http://localhost:8888/wordpress/