After first using XAMPP, I moved to MAMP. And just noticed another interesting AMP tool called AMPPS. AMPPS stands for Apache, Mysql, PHP, Perl, Python and Softaculous auto-installer. This is basically an alternative to WAMP, MAMP and XAMPP for Windows and Mac OS X. It’s quite a new tool (version 1.0 was released in August 2011) but with quite frequent updates and it’s free !

It can be downloaded at ampps.com. There is a Windows and a Mac installer:

The Mac package is 212 MB (version 1.7). Even though I have a DSL 16000 connection (and can thus download from other sites up to 1.8 MB/s), it took me about an hour until I was ready to install it:

Installing it will take up 676.5 MB of your harddrive. This is quite a lot but it does include 264 scripts to install software like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, phpBB, MediaWiki, SquirrelMail, Roundcube, Mantis Bug Tracker, osTicket, Zend Framework, CakePHP, phpMyAdmin, jQuery and Dojo. It can also update them all automatically (but you can turn it off).

When you start the app, you’ll first see the control center. You can start Apache and MySQL there:

You can also click on one of the other tabs to get access to configuration files or log files.

After starting Apache, you can click on the admin icon in the lower right corner. This will open the administration page of AMPPS. When you then click on Software, you’ll see that the WordPress installation script is part of the package:

Now in order to install an instance of WordPress, you need to go back to the AMPPS control center and click “Local Web” icon (in the lower left corner). If will open a web page. There choose blog on the left hand side and then WordPress:

When you click on the install button, you’ll see the following page allowing to configure the usual installation parameters of WordPress:

Click install after you’ve entered the required data.

After a short time, it’s done installing:

And you can start working with your local WordPress installation.

Installing WordPress in MAMP or XAMPP isn’t that difficult but AMPPS really beats them both regarding ease of installation !