How to automatically start XAMPP on MacOSX

I thought I’d post up my solution to auto-starting  XAMPP when I turn on my iMac; Although I normally develop on Linux and Windows… I have a nice shiney iMac downstairs of which I’m starting to use more and more for development.

I hope this very quick tutorial is of help to some other people too 🙂

First of all you need to open up the terminal on your MacOSX machine (I’m current using MacOSX 10.7 ‘Lion’)

At the terminal enter the following comamnds:-

cd /Library/StartupItems
sudo mkdir xampp
cd xampp/
sudo nano xampp

When Nano opens up, you should populate the file with the following:-

#!/bin/sh
/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/xampp start

If you installed XAMPP elsewhere you will need to modify the path above.

You can also start specific xampp apps for example, starting apache only by using /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/xampp startapache instead.

sudo nano  StartupParameters.plist

Again, we need to populate the file with the following contents:-

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE plist SYSTEM “file://localhost/System/Library/DTDs/PropertyList.dtd”>
<plist version=”0.9″>
<dict>
<key>Description</key>
<string>XAMPP</string>
<key>OrderPreference</key>
<string>Late</string>
<key>Provides</key>
<array>
<string>Starts Apache and MySQL</string>
</array>
<key>Uses</key>
<array>
<string>SystemLog</string>
</array>
</dict>
</plist>

Last of all, now we just need to set a few permissions etc. on the new files we’ve created…

cd ..
sudo chown -R root xampp
sudo chgrp -R wheel xampp
sudo chmod 755 xampp/xampp

That it, to test it out, restart your Mac, login and try to access http://localhost from your browser…. You should find that XAMPP is now automatically started 🙂