I’ve been a MAMP user for years, but at WordCamp Chicago, Suzette Franck handed me a thumbdrive with free version of DesktopServer on it. Interested (and not just because a thumbdrive with an app on it is the way I expect to be handed software today), I installed it once I got back to my office.
Installation and Setup
You can’t run the zip from the the thumbdrive. It’s a 250meg drive with only 50 megs to spare, so because a Mac is silly, I had to copy the files locally and then unzip. It would be ‘better’ (and this is subjective) if the drive had the installer apps instead of the zips. That said, I know they were copying the zips to the thumbdrives manually so I totally give them a pass.
Once I did unzip it, it said it would have to restart. So I shut down everything, installed, and … no restart. I think it was a poor choice of words:
Right, clearly I wasn’t paying attention. Still, it’s a strange thing to warn when it didn’t actually happen! Now, I know what they meant is this:
I hate that MAMP does this too, and have long used the MAMP No Password app to work around this. I’d love to see that added to Desktop Server.
There were a lot of click-throughs, but that it let me add and create a dev website, complete with the hosts file, was nice. I liked that I was able to easily tell it to install in Sites (where I like my sites!), but I didn’t like that it’s bundled with WordPress 3.5.1:
Actually I don’t like that it’s bundled with WordPress. Blasphemy! But really, it would be killer if it could just have a dropdown of options: WordPress, Drupal, etc. Then when it runs, it grabs from the latest build. WordPress does this with latest.zip. Drupal doesn’t. Didn’t know that. You should, Drupal! For now, people have come up with an interesting wget based solution, so that would be an awesome thing to add. But I clicked WP (vs nothing), which is the default. I was directed to my site, where all I had to fill in was username and such. All the DB work was done!
Using DesktopServer
At this point, I was done so I closed DesktopServer.
My site, elftest.dev, was up and running and it was easy to use. Perfect! Seriously, at this point it just worked. If I wanted to spin up another site, that was easy too.
Sadly, it’s not easy to make a subdomain site ala Multisite. I wanted to add ‘foo.elftest.dev’ and I tried to select this be installed in elftest.dev, but got this instead:
That’s okay for me, I know how to use my hosts file, but it would be nice to have this more accessible. After all, the draw of DesktopServer is that it’s easy right?
Shutting down DesktopServer
Here it’s weird. I had shut down the app, because it was done. But doing this only closes the app, not the Apache instance, so I had to reopen (and ‘reboot’ it with Admin rights again) to be presented with this:
Now I could shut down.
Conclusions
It’s a split decision. When I’m using the “MAMP no password” app, it’s certainly easier to activate and deactivate MAMP. However, DesktopServer wins with ease to spin up new sites. For someone like me, who needs to quickly test sites for customers and likes to use foo.dev or foo.loc to test, this is great. I don’t need to hassle with anything, just turn it on, add a site, done. DesktopServer is a little in the middle between easy for newbies and awesome for devs. It’s got a lot of room where I could see it growing, and that’s enough to keep me using it
The downsides are:
- Have to ‘restart’ the app with my admin password.
- Can’t fully customize the website location
- Can’t customize the TLD (no example.co.dv to test an example.co.uk site, and yes I do that)
- No menu-bar tool to activate/deactivate
I’m going to keep using it, of course. The benefit of a fast spin-up of new sites, for what I do with testing people’s sites and fixing them at work, wins hands down.