I recently reformmatted my mac and did a clean install of Snow Leopard 10.6. Upon launching MAMP I noticed the MySQL server would not load.  The simple fix was to enable my personal user account Read / Write permissions on the /applications/mamp folder.  While this could probably be fixed by enabling read/write on only certain MAMP sub-folders. I decided to give my user permissions along the whole directory tree.

1. Navigate to the /applications/mamp folder and “get info” on that folder.  You can do this by hitting “command + i” or right clicking on the folder.
2. At the bottom of the info window that pops up you should see “Sharing & Permissions”. Click the arrow to expand this box.
3. If you see a small lock icon on the bottom right of this box click it to make sure you can edit the folders permissions.  You may be prompted for an administrative users name and password if your account is not an administrative one.  Enter an administrators user-name and password.
4. Click the + symbol at the bottom of the the info window and choose your account.
5. Next to your user-name choose the “Read & Write” permissions.
6. Click the little gear in the bottom middle of the info window and choose “Apply to enclosed items”.  This will ensure to give you read / write access to all folders.
7. As a security precaution you can give the “everyone” user “no access”. This will prevent non-admin users from being able to access data stored in MAMP.

My next step is to figure out a system of symlinks to store MAMP databases inside my personal home folder that is encrypted using FileVault.