I installed my mamp stack via macports, so the normal GUI-tools of Mac OS won't let me toggle any services. Coming from the Linux / init world thats my bumbling approach to have a quick startup-script for Apache and MySQL: #!/bin/bash if [ "$1" == "start" ]; then /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start& /opt/local/bin/mysqld_safe5& else /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl stop /opt/local/bin/mysqladmin5 -u root shutdown fi