While OpenLabyrinth is a very plain and simple web server at its core, most educators do not want to be bothered with the complexities of setting up their own web server. For most such users, simply requesting a Free Trial account on our demo server will be more than sufficient for their needs.

But for those who do want to mess with their own settings, or to be able to run cases on their own portable server, there are now nice options which are not too hard to set up. OpenLabyrinth was originally set up to use the commonest web server platform of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (commonly known as LAMP).

For Mac users, there is a nice little tool called MAMP (MacOS, Apache, MySQL, PHP). MAMP has a free version available from https://www.mamp.info/en/ (you don’t need the Pro version really) that is very easy to install.

From there, it is then not too complicated to install OpenLabyrinth into the MAMP server structure. Now there are one or two little quirks to be aware of. I wrote up a lengthy (but aimed at people of my level – i.e. pretty basic) guide on how to install OLab onto MAMP which I can send to anyone who is interested.

For Windows users, there is WAMP, which is much the same idea. And a few of us have installed OLab onto WAMP as well without much difficulty.

We are happy to hear from anyone who has tried such an installation and to share tips on this.