Okay, so sometimes our shiny friend and development support buddy MAMP won’t start properly.  I’ve found this often happens when you’ve first booted up your Mac and you try to start getting stuck into your code.

Symptoms are pretty simple to diagnose – you start MAMP, and it’s control panel pops up and shows that everything is running:

MAMP Control Panel

But for some reason you can’t access your webserver or database:

MAMP not working

What to do?  Restarting the servers generally doesn’t solve the problem.  However, there is a trick I’ve discovered.  Open up the control panel and click the “Preferences…” button.  Once this popups up, choose the “Ports” tab, change nothing – and click OK:

MAMP Preferences Pane

MAMP will automatically restart – and you should be up and running!