I can't access phpmyadmin with mamp

On the latest version of MAMP (4.1.1), the default option in the settings was set to "PHP 7.1.1". After I set the default option to 7.0.15, the PHPmyAdmin tools were no longer grayed and worked fine.

I often get MAMP giving me the red light for MySQL.

Every time I fixed it by quitting every instance of the mysqld process.

Check in Activity Monitor for multiple instances of that process running - if there are, then that is your problem. Quit them all, and restart MAMP.

Activity monitor can be found in Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.app. - Search for mysqld in the search box in the top right of activity monitor, and if there are multiple instances running, quit them all.

If not, try quitting the process anyway and restart MAMP.

Update: Easier way to perform this:

$ killall mysqld

From terminal.

I had the same or similar issue where PHPMyAdmin was greyed out after installing MAMP 3.5. I checked the PHP version and it was set to 5.2, so I just bumped it up to 5.6 and the my PHPmyAdmin icon became active.

Hope that helps.