White screen of death on MAMP: increasing memory limit in php.ini

In MAMP, php.ini for PHP5 often needs to be edited because it is set to only 8MB by default, leading to white screen of death. It is found here (using Terminal or iTerm):

vi /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/php.ini

And in Vi you can search for memory limit by typing /memory, and i to start editing text.

You can then go to the MAMP application and stop servers and start them again.

(Posted as comment to handbook here.)

Extra tip: Take a look behind that white screen the professional way, using unix-style system logs:

tail -f /Applications/MAMP/logs/php_error.log

for PHP's error log on a standard MAMP install.

The procedure is very similar on a professional Debian, Ubuntu, or other Linux server.

Resolution