Drupal 7 install failure OSX mavericks MAMP

Question

I've been getting the dreaded WSOD on just the basic install of Drupal 7.26 using MAMP 2.2

I looked at Fatal error: Call to undefined function field_attach_load() in includes/entity.inc on line 321 during install

And also looked at Blank pages or "white screen of death" (WSOD)

Answer 1

I wasted several hours trying to find the problem. It seems to be related to an issue with PHP 5.5.3 which is the default on MAMP 2.2. I went into MAMP preferences, and changed the PHP tab to use PHP 5.2.17. I then edited /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.2.17/conf/php.ini to add the settings for max_execution_time = 300 and memory_limit = 256M

I went back to MAMP and restarted the servers. Used a fresh copy of drupal-7.26 and the install finally worked (after adding a fresh new db and user in phpMyAdmin on http://'localhost':8888/MAMP/)

I still have no idea why PHP 5.5.3 fails miserably

Answer 2

I just had this issue with a new system and php 5.6. There is a lot of possible reasons for this problem according to drupal.org, see Link to Drupal.org

None of suggestion there worked for me.

My issue was really simple to solve. sessions did not work at all. so just check if you see something like "Failed to write session data" in your error logs.