I use MAMP daily. I love MAMP. I recently discovered how truly awesome MAMP Pro is too. But that’s a story for another time. I recently upgraded from MAMP 1.8.4 to 1.9. When I got MAMP 1.9 installed I started the servers. Apache came up but MySQL didn’t want to. I tried shutting down both servers and starting it back up again, which didn’t work.
Thankfully, there is a pretty simple fix. To begin with, make sure MAMP is shut down. Next, open Terminal. To open Terminal either open Spotlight (Cmd+Space) and type “terminal” or you can find Terminal in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder.
Once you get Terminal opened, type the following:
ps aux | grep mysql lsof -i killall -9 mysqld
That’s it. Start up MAMP and MySQL will come back up just like normal. Another option would be to simply change the port number MySQL is using in MAMP. Restarting your computer may work too but I did’t try that.

Thanks – this fixed INSTANTLY! Keep up the killa posts!!!!
Nice one… took a couple of attempts but I was 3rd time lucky… Thanks
thx!
Wow… I wish I would have found this an hour ago! Just came across it while downloading Xampp for Mac, and was about to drop MAMP. Thanks to this, I’m up and running!
Your a legend!!!
Excellent! I was having trouble with MAMP killing my MySQL server every once in a while for no reason, but this is definitely a much shorter solution than having to restart your computer (yes, that works).
Wow! and thank you. Worked like a charm.
Hi there. Thanks a lot but what do the commands actually mean?
Many thanks. Saved me a lot of time.
Amazing! Worked like a charm. Thanks.