We use MAMP PRO as our local environment when we do LAMP work.  Here’s how to set it up using DynDNS so that you can provide web accessible urls to your vhosts.  This is handy to share with clients or coworkers in other offices but also for using web apps like Litmus (which was the situation I was in today).

1) Create a free account at dyndns.com.  Once you’ve activated your account, go here to create your domains.  Name them whatever you want and use the auto detected IP address.  Go through the add to cart hoops, but it will be free.

2) Setup port forwarding in your router.  You may not need to this, but I’m guessing most would and it’s the most confusing part IMO.  We have an Airport Extreme and the configuration is below.  10.0.1.201 is the local IP of my computer on our network.  I’m port 80 externally to my local port 80.

3) Setup MAMP.  Last step, go into MAMP and add the domain you created in DynDNS as an alias of your vhost.  This isn’t super documented but I saw the tip here.  It should all be humming now.  Now you can go to whatever.hobby-site.org and the request will travel down to your local box.

This is an easy thing but I never took the time to figure it out because I use phpMyAdmin so much. Exporting a database is easy with phpMyAdmin, but importing if it is large can be hard because a lot of times your connection will time out or PHP is restricting how big you can upload or whatever. If you can SSH, this is easier:

mysql -u USER -p DBNAME < dump.sql

If you are on Media Temple’s DV server, like us, you can do this:

my DBNAME < dump.sql

So much easier!