MAMP Viewer

The MAMP PRO & MAMP Viewer combo is a great way of previewing your web sites on a mobile device. MAMP Viewer can be found on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. In order to make your individual host visible in the MAMP Viewer you must activate it on the Hosts > Settings > General Tab. Restart your servers to enable viewing in MAMP Viewer.

MAMP

Preview your work using the MAMP Viewer, available on iOS.

MAMP

MAMP Viewer and WordPress

As most local networks do not have an easy-to-configure DNS (Domain Name Server) that you could teach about the hosts you want to preview, MAMP PRO uses the Bonjour networking technology (aka Zeroconf) and a feature we call “shadow hosts” to make up for the lack of real DNS entries. So instead of MAMP Viewer going directly to a “mycoolhost”, it calls “mycallhostAtyourmachine.local” and the web servers of MAMP PRO make sure you still get “mycoolhost”.

This works quite well unless a web application itself stores the name of the host it is running on. Unfortunately, this is exactly what WordPress does. And the more plugins a WordPress site uses, the more this fact interferes with the technique MAMP Viewer uses. Simple WordPress sites typically work, more complex ones might stop MAMP Viewer from showing a precise preview. In this case we recommend using our local DNS Server App NAMO.

NAMO

If you are running on a Mac there is a great way around this “shadow host” problem. NAMO is a local DNS that reads MAMP Viewer hosts from MAMP PRO and makes them available on the local network - using their real names, in any browser, not just the MAMP Viewer. You can find more information about NAMO here.