A few months back I installed MAMP on my MacBook Pro to do local development. I found it a lot easier to manage than a regular MySQL install on Mac. Until things went south. Out of no where my MAMP start page broke and would only return this error:
You don’t have permission to access /MAMP/ on this server.
With an HTTP 403 Forbidden error. The Apache error log provided some additional details:
Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden: /Applications/MAMP/bin/mamp/
That was enough for me to start looking through the Apache config file – /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf – to see what needed to be fixed. The Options directive for the start page, and the related pages like /phpMyAdmin, was limited to “Indexes MultiViews”. I didn’t want to bother with spelling out each option that might need to be turned on so I went with “Options All”.
If you have run into this problem then check the Options directive for the following directories: /Applications/MAMP/Library/icons, /Applications/MAMP/bin/phpMyAdmin, /Applications/MAMP/bin/SQLiteManager and /Applications/MAMP/bin/mamp. Change the “Options Indexes MultiViews” line to “Options All” under each of the Directory sections. In my config file that area starts on line 621.
After making those changes re-start MAMP’s Apache and you should be good to go.