Installing Memcache on MAMP

Post author By Jack Slingerland
Post date February 2, 2011
7 Comments on Installing Memcache on MAMP

For the better part of 2 hours I tried and failed to get the Memcache extension installed on MAMP. I tried following several guides, but everything fell flat on it’s face about 75% of the way through. I eventually figured it out, and I wanted to share it so that other people don’t have to go through the pain and suffering that I did. It turns out to be surprisingly easy, but YMMV.

Step 1: Install XCode

Step 2: Make the MAMP PHP binary files executable

sudo chmod +xrw /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/bin/p*

Step 3: Get the Memcache extension source

cd ~
wget http://pecl.php.net/get/memcache-2.2.5.tgz
tar -zxvf memcache-2.2.5.tgz
cd memcache-2.2.5

Step 4: PHPize the Memcache extension files

/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/bin/phpize

Step 5: Compile the Memcache extension

./configure
make

Step 6: Add the extension to the PHP.ini file

Add the following to the end of your PHP 5.3 ini file via the MAMP file menu.

extension=memcache.so

Step 7: Copy the memcache extension to the PHP extension folder

cp modules/memcache.so /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-[yourtimestamp]/

The “[yourtimestamp]” varies per installation, but you should just be able to tab complete that part.

Tags mamp, memcache, PHP

By Jack Slingerland

Founder of Kernl.us. Working and living in Raleigh, NC. I manage teams of software engineers and work in Python, Django, TypeScript, Node.js, React+Redux, Angular, and PHP. I enjoy hanging out with my wife and kids, lifting weights, and PC gaming in my free time.

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7 replies on “Installing Memcache on MAMP”

[…] on it’s face about 75% of the way through. I eventually figured it out, and I wanted to… [full post] Jack Slingerland Re-Cycled Air php programmingmampmemcachephp 0 0 […]

Thanks, nice how-to.

[…] as an exercise for you. Once that’s installed, you should check out my guide for getting the PHP Memcache module installed on XAMPP, that way you can run this tutorial […]

As an update to Jack’s great tutorial on installing memcache, when I followed his instructions, everything was compiling and configured successfully, but for the life of me, I could not get MAMP to see the module. I had a suspicion that the memcache.so file was compiled for 32-bit or 64-bit and MAMP wasn’t loading the extension correctly.

if you run into this problem, in Step 5, replace the ./configure line with:

CFLAGS=’-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os’ LDFLAGS=’-O3 -arch i386 -arch x86_64′ CXXFLAGS=’-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os’ ./configure –disable-dependancy-tracking –disable-shared -enable-static

… Then continue on with the steps and memcache will install against MAMP Pro / PHP 5.3 successfully.

Source: http://blog.elinkmedia.net.au/2010/11/02/enable-memcache-on-mamp/

Thanks for a great article. Why did you go with compiling from source rather than using PECL? Here’s an up-to-date guide I wrote that uses PECL+Homebrew:

http://www.silviogutierrez.com/blog/drupal-6-and-memcached-mamp/

Thanks for the brilliant tut! I’ve followed it exactly but I get the following error when starting MAMP.

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: memcache: Unable to initialize module
Module compiled with module API=20100525
PHP compiled with module API=20121212
These options need to match
in Unknown on line 0

I am running MAMP Pro v3 with PHP 5.5.10. Any ideas?

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