I tried installing MovableType locally in my laptops webserver (OSX), but ran into some snags. It turns out that there are non built-in perl modules required for it to access the MySQL database. What made it worse is that I was running MAMP and not the normal Apache webserver bundled with the OS.

I figured I’d write this for those users planning to do the same thing… and of course the ever persistent reason of “for my future reference.”

First a couple of preliminary facts: the MySQL is not activated by default… it isn’t even configured. Unlike Apache, which can be launched via System Preferences, the MySQL server has to be started via Terminal (well, at least, that’s what I had to do).

MAMP¹ solves that problem because it was meant to be self-contained by design. Meaning every component you would usually have for dynamic publishing, is already included and pre-configured. Unfortunately, this is a very broad area to cover, so MAMP only deals with the most common stuff people need, and can’t really be expected to have any other special modules installed by default.

Before everything else, now is a good time to install the Developer Tools included in your OSX CD, you need this to compile and install the Perl modules you’ll need for MT-MySQL access.

It is to be noted that Perl support isn’t enabled by default in MAMP so make sure to configure your httpdconf file to enable it. Just uncomment the line (take out the #) where it says:

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

Once you’ve done that, visit this URL http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-category/07_Database_Interfaces/DBD/

Download these latest (or not) versions of these two files (where x are numbers):

• DBI Module (filename is DBI-X.XX.tar.gz)
• DBD::MySQL module (filename is DBD-mysql-X.XXXX.tar.gz)

Extract both of these files in /Library/Perl

To install the DBI module, do this (again x is a number):

cd /Library/Perl/DBI-X.XX

sudo Perl Makefile.PL sudo make sudo make install

To install the DBD::MySQL module, it’s pretty much the same with one nuance.

cd /Library/Perl/DBD-mysql-X.XXXX

sudo Perl Makefile.PL –mysqlconfig=/Applications/MAMP/bin/mysql4/bin/mysqlconfig sudo make sudo make install

Notice the extra parameters in one line – this is precisely because we are on a MAMP environment, and you have to explicitly point it there, else it wont compile properly. Of course the actual path of --mysql_config= would depend where you put your MAMP folder.

Once both have been installed, you can delete the folders where you extracted them to. Because the installed modules should now be located in a folder resembling /Library/Perl/X.X.X/darwin-thread-multi-2level (at least that’s where it put mine)

That’s it! You’re now ready to use MovableType locally on your machine with MySQL support ;)