I am a new user (or trying to be!). I downloaded moodle for mac, and followed instruction but when I try to open the links for installation, I can;t open them .I saw there was a similar post by someone with a newer mac and operation system than mine, and there were instructions on how to solve the problem (i.e.: what you have do do is, first change the default ports of Apache and MySQL in MAMP, from ports 8888 for Apache to 80 and for MySQL,
port 3306 instead of port 8889........), but I do not even comprehend what this means! This was supposed to be super simple!
Although a Mac user, I've never tried to use the OSX installer. However, seeing as nobody else has replied I'll do my best...
When you say, "I can't open them" - what *exactly* happens? What do you see? Are there any errors reported?
About a month ago I tried this and encountered similar problems. Usman suggested the following, which fixed the problem for me.
Go to Applications/MAMP/Library/bin and rename envvarsit to _envvars.
I am not sure if after applying this change, that it was really necessary to mess with port settings (which I did first, and it did work).
See discussion at https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=276177#p1188500 for some additional information.
By the way, I really like being able to have this local server on my Mac. It is great for experimenting. I have about four different versions of Moodle. It is (of course) really fast, too.
port part is optional, though always good to use default ports for WebServer and MySQL
I have the MAMP installed, and I would like to use the database and moodledata file from our production site to create an offline copy for archiving. Is that possible?
Certainly! I am doing the same. I have an archive version of my Moodle 1.9 installed, and a copy of my current Moodle 2.8, as of 12/31/15 also installed. You can install as many copies as you want. I think you can pretty much follow the directions for migrating Moodle (don't have its link, sorry).
When I do this, I follow a method that helps me keep my sanity.
My current moodle is ../moodle, database=moodle, moodledata, and database user=mdl.
For 1.9, ../moodle19, database=moodle19, moodledata19, and database user=mdl19.
For my experimental versions: ../moodle28, database=moodle28, moodledata28, and database user=mdl28.
Without a good scheme, you could go crazy keeping track of what is where.
One more interesting advantage of running MAMP... If you are also running Time Machine, you have very good backups of anything you do with MAMP!