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MAMP Viewer

The MAMP PRO & MAMP Viewer combo is a great way to preview your websites on a mobile device. MAMP Viewer is available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. To make your individual host visible in the MAMP Viewer, you must enable it in the [Hosts > Settings > General] tab (/Software-Documentation/en/MAMP-PRO-Mac/Settings/Hosts/General/#mamp_viewer). Restart your servers to enable viewing in the MAMP Viewer.

MAMP PRO - Host - General - Resolution

Preview your work with the MAMP Viewer, available for iOS.

MAMP Viewer

MAMP Viewer and WordPress

Since most local networks do not have an easily configured DNS (Domain Name Server) that you can tell about the hosts you want to preview, MAMP PRO uses Bonjour networking technology (aka Zeroconf) and a feature we call “shadow hosts” to make up for the lack of real DNS records. So instead of MAMP Viewer going directly to a “mycoolhost”, it calls “mycallhostAtyourmachine.local” and MAMP PRO’s web servers make sure you still get “mycoolhost”.

This works pretty well unless a web application itself stores the name of the host it is running on. Unfortunately, that 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 will usually work, but more complex ones may prevent MAMP Viewer from displaying an accurate preview. In this case we recommend using our local DNS server application 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. More information about NAMO can be found here.