tl;dr

Disable the Opera Turbo feature

Issue

MAMP is not working, gives

Connection refused: localhost:8888

It was working the night before, nothing has been changed in terms of settings.. Going to 127.0.0.1:8888 worked, but didn’t load any resources (jpegs, css etc.).

Things i have tried:

• restart MAMP (didn’t work)
• change ports and restart (didn’t work)
• ping localhost to see if i get a response (pinged just fine)

ping localhost

• re-installed MAMP (my version was one minor release older so what the heck, didn’t work)
• Flush DNS cache (didn’t work)

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

This gave a Connection refused; localhost:8888 on localhost but 127.0.0.1 works and shows me the start page. If i click ‘My Website’ from the start page, redirects to localhost and gives the error.

• Check logs (no issues there). The MAMP logs are in /Applications/MAMP/logs

[Mon Oct 02 22:32:11 2017] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] client denied by server configuration: /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/.DS_Store

So i deleted all .DS_Strore files in the /Applications/MAMP/ folder.

find . -name '.DS_Store' -exec rm -rf {} \;

Didn’t help.

• Turn off Opera Turbo. SOLVED! The only change i had made was to my browser, i use Opera and had enabled the Opera Turbo feature that speeds up website loading. That was the issue. Sites work now, everything loads just fine.