OMG! APPLE IS GUTTING SERVER.APP!!!! Part 1 Web to MAMP

In July, I will be presenting at MacAdmins at PSU. My talk will be called “OMG! APPLE IS GUTTING SERVER.APP!!!!” I will be using my blog to document all the processes taken to get all the data.

The goal of this is to find easy ways to move away from Server.app while utilizing the existing Apple hardware in your server closet and macOS. Sure you can move to a new system, but you might not have the money or time.

You can find the slide deck here.

Server.app -> MAMP

I started with a simple MunkiReport instance running in Server.app. I figured this would be using enough resources to move. I also got a certificate with Let’s Encrypt and had all traffic going through SSL. While the blog post is specifically for servers running 10.12, my steps were the same in 10.13.

1. Let’s start by downloading MAMP.
2. Turn off Server.app’s web function
   
3. Run the installer you had downloaded.
4. From /Applications/MAMP launch MAMP
5. Click start Servers, and check that yourdomain:8888 is working.
   
6. Go to Preferences and click on Web-Server. Set the location to be the old root folder.
7. Stop/Start the server and test.
8. Go to Preferences and click on Ports. Click that “Set Web & MySQL ports to 80 & 3306 button.
   
9. Stop/Start the server and check to make sure it’s working on port 80.

Your web server is up and running. Mostly. Next we need to get SSL setup. MAMP Pro has an easy GUI to do this, but that costs money and this is easy enough for our needs.

I used this this gist to help me through this process.

We already know that MAMP is working on port 80, so you can ignore the first bits of that file.

1. Duplicate your /Applications/MAMP/conf/ folder, rename the copy something like conf.backup.
2. Obviously you were using Server.app already and were using it with a Let’s Encrypt certificate using my procedure outlined on this post. So you should have on your Desktop a couple .pem files. Rename them fqdn.crt and fqdn.key and move them to /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache
3. Open /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf in BBEdit or your favourite text editor and uncomment by removing the #, Include /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/extra/httpd-ssl.conf.
4. Edit /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/extra/httpd-ssl.conf and search for General setup for the virtual host. From there, you’ll want to enter the path to the web files.
5. In the same file, you’ll see information about server.crt and server.key. Rename the server part to match the names of the files in step two.
6. Stop/Start the service.