MAMP’s MySQL status red & not starting

MAMP is a good way to setup a low-maintenance dev environment for OS X in very little time, but its handling of MySQL is quite annoying.

When you suspend/sleep a computer, often when you resume MAMP has lost track of the MySQL instance it started and can no longer connect to it. Not sure if this is a problem with the MySQL build being used, but as the problem has existed since 2009, I don’t have high hopes for it being fixed anytime soon.

The quickest solution is to kill off the process it had started previously and then hit “Start Servers” again – it just takes one line on the terminal.

killall -9 mysqld

Be aware that this will kill all running MySQL processes (including those outside of MAMP’s control) – this is normally fine, as no-one actually hosts websites on OS X!