Why does MAMP (mac) with port 80 results in forbidden access while port 8888 works fine?

Question

I just moved my dev environment from an older machine to a new MAC. I like to use MAMP for my general local environment (simpler projects) but for some reason, the recent version of MAMP wants me to use port 8888 for my localhost.

I changed it back to port 80 which is what I had on MAMP on my old machine, and I have some absolute dev links so I don't want the hassle of putting localhost:8888 instead of just localhost at the beginning of my Uri:s

The result was that no resource could be accessed, everything was forbidden. Change the port back to 8888 and it works fine.

Why do I get this behavior?

Someone else seems to have had this same issue a month back (Can't connect to port 80 in MAMP on MAc) with no solution.

------------------ update

lsof -I tcp:80

COMMAND    PID    USER   FD   TYPE             DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
    Google     973 mattias   28u  IPv6 0x269b774a91275221      0t0  TCP localhost:54383->localhost:http (CLOSE_WAIT)
    Google     973 mattias   36u  IPv6 0x269b774a91275881      0t0  TCP localhost:54384->localhost:http (CLOSE_WAIT)
    httpd     5444 mattias    4u  IPv6 0x269b774a912738a1      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
    httpd     5445 mattias    4u  IPv6 0x269b774a912738a1      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
    httpd     5446 mattias    4u  IPv6 0x269b774a912738a1      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
    httpd     5447 mattias    4u  IPv6 0x269b774a912738a1      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
    httpd     5448 mattias    4u  IPv6 0x269b774a912738a1      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
    httpd     5449 mattias    4u  IPv6 0x269b774a912738a1      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
    httpd     5461 mattias    4u  IPv6 0x269b774a912738a1      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
    httpd     5468 mattias    4u  IPv6 0x269b774a912738a1      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
    httpd     5476 mattias    4u  IPv6 0x269b774a912738a1      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
    httpd     5477 mattias    4u  IPv6 0x269b774a912738a1      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
    httpd     5478 mattias    4u  IPv6 0x269b774a912738a1      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)

Also, http://localhost/MAMP/ works fine

When I try to access any of my own folders in the webroot I get forbidden:

If I try a first-level folder (i e http://localhost/myapp/, located in webroot/myapp) I get only

Forbidden You don't have permission to access this resource.

But if I try a subfolder or a PHP file such as http://localhost/myapp/subfolder/ or http://localhost/myapp/subfolder/index.php

then I instead get

Forbidden You don't have permission to access this resource. Server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe

If I configure MAMP to use a different port it all works fine. But I don't want to have to specify a port in my route in dev env since the app I'm working on has some hard-coded Uri:s.

Also, this is a weird behaviour that annoys me =) My other MAC isn't doing this so I'd like to get to the bottom of it...

------- another update

I have moved my web root (htdocs I believe MAMP called it by default) into my user folder (user/Home/Documents/www) if it is somehow permission related, but I don't understand why it then works fine under port 8888 but not under 80... it's not like Apache gets access to my folder based on what port it's running off of...

------- requested info

I occasionally start a node server just to check a guy's work but not running at the moment. When it's on it runs under port 3000-something.

.htaccess of my web/ folder: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain-name.com$ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain-name.com$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !folder/ RewriteRule (.*) /folder/$1 [L]

Mac version Big Sur 11.3.1

MAMP version 6.3

user_15741634 · Answer

This happens because there are other apps using port 80. One that comes to mind is skype. you could try lsof -i tcp:80 to see which processes are locking port 80.

user_942230 · Answer

I have moved my webroot (htdocs I believe MAMP called it by default) into my user folder (user/Home/Documents/www) if it is somehow permission related, but I don't understand why it then works fine under port 8888 but not under 80... itäs not like Apache gets access to my folder based on what port it's running off of...

This is the issue. I have no idea why the behavior is different with a different port, but setting the wwwroot to MAMP/htdocs and moving my application there solved the probem.

I won't mark this as THE answer, in case someone can explain why MAMP gets permission to wwwroot when it's in my Home folder as long as it runs on port 8080 or something else, and NO permission while on port 80, that would be the best answer to this question...

user_1411958 · Answer

There could be multiple reasons I can think of. I'd like to also propose a workaround for each.

Firstly, Mac (Darwin) is based off of Linux. This means the ports under 1024 range are privileged. Any application running in ring 3 (userland) cannot access the ports.

You need to run the applications with sudo privileges. This of-course comes with security risk and should be done only after due considerations. Usually you should not run Webservers (and dev environments like MAMP) with sudo. See my last point for a solution, which is often used as a best practice in many production environments.

Secondly, there is a high possibility that you're tryin to run it as root, but still the port isn't accessible. This could be due to the fact that the port is already taken up by another application.

To check this, you can issue lsof -i tcp:80 which I can see you did anyway. Kill other applications that are blocking this port for you. Sometimes quitting application is not enough, you might have to use sudo kill -9 pid. More information is in this man page.

Thirdly, A Mac specific problem could be (which I think is the case with you because you arere seeing different errors when accessing webroot and subfolders)that either the gatekeeper is preventing MAMP from accessing the directories, or the chmod permissions aren't proper (because I see a .htaccess complaint).

First check if the Mac Gatekeeper System Preference -> Pivacy & Security -> General isn't blocking the application.
Then check if the directory access is enabled for MAMP from Full Disk Access or Files and Folders available under System Preference -> Pivacy & Security -> Privacy
Lastly you can recursively set a chmod 755 permission on your project directories and 644 on the files. chmod -R 755 DIRECTORY. Have a look at this SupeUser post for futher details.

And in the last, if nothing else works, you run MAMP on some other port and then redirect all local traffic from port 80 that port using iptables. This is mostly how webservers are actually configured in the production environment too, if they are not hidden behind a load-balancer or a reverse-proxy. Please refer this AskUbunu post for the instructions.

user_19668697 · Answer

When setting up the Apache tab, check the "Indexes" box:

That will give you access to your localhost:8888.

Why does MAMP (mac) with port 80 results in forbidden access while port 8888 works fine?

4 Answers