Creating a my.cnf File in MAMP (not MAMP Pro)

MAMP Pro, by default, comes with a my.cnf file configured and even has an interface to allow you to edit it.

For whatever reason, I haven’t been able to purchase MAMP Pro though…I go through the process on their website but just end up with a blank screen after trying to pay…so I needed to figure out how to do this with just MAMP on my own. It took some digging, and piecing together of information scattered across the web, so I thought I’d put it all together for you here in one place.

  1. Open /Applications/MAMP/Library/support-files/my-small.cnf in your preferred text editor, but note that Text Edit is not going to work. Once I saved my new file (below) with Text Edit, it forced my Mac to think it was a .txt file and even if I tried to rename it via Finder, it would automatically add the .txt extension. I used Coda 2 to edit my .cnf files.
  2. Copy everything in that file and paste it into another file (again, I did this in Coda to avoid the .txt extension).
  3. Save that file as my.cnf in the following directory: /Applications/MAMP/conf/

You now have an editable my.cnf file for your local MAMP setup!

In case you’d like to just download an example my.cnf file that you can pop in that same directory, I’ve provided that here as well:

Download my.cnf (ZIP, 149kb)

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