The Artistic Outlaw

November 19th 2007 / learned, taught

Mac OS X 10.5, MAMP and VMWare Fusion

This is a note to myself more than a real post, so feel free to ignore it or use the info if need arises.

When using vmware fusion for MSIE testing on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard through a MAMP based localhost. WordPress sites acts weird and won’t let you view sites on the localhost through MSIE.

The cause and solution of this issue is the following;

On the mac, with a MAMP based localhost, sites can be accessed via a url similar to:

http://localhost/~sites/

Whereas the same localhost setup viewed through vmware fusion using MSIE has to be accessed via a url like this:

http://mac's-ip(127.0.0.1)/~sites/

This causes a problem for WordPress based builds, because WordPress stores the full absolute URL to the install in it’s MySQL database in the table wp_options there are two rows that store the URL you need to change. They are siteurl and home. Just modify them and change the localhost bit of the URL to your mac’s localhost IP address.

Now WordPress will work fine through both vmware fusion’s MSIE install and your own mac browsers, because the mac doesn’t care if you use localhost or the IP to access your localhost sites.

Now you’re cooking with gas my friends.