With POW 3.2 I’ve been noticing every once in a while it’ll choke and try and burn out my CPU, thankfully there’s a temporary fix with the PRE 4.0 release.

This you can install via

curl get.pow.cx | VERSION=0.4.0-pre sh

More info here

So when you install pow it also injects a rule in your firewall to route all traffic for port 80 to pow even if pow is shutdown, which kind of interfere’s with OSX Web Sharing MAMP, XAMP or whatever your using.

To get around this you could add:

export POW_DST_PORT=88

Then uninstall & re-install POW, it’ll see you want to use port 88 for POW, not install the firewall route and leave port 80 fine for web-sharing, you’ll have to add some extra rules in your apache vhosts to route traffic back to POW so it works again but then suddenly be restricted to needing Apache around which is just messy.

Alternatively you could forgo the .powconfig change, leave it on port 80 and the firewall rule intact and install a gem called POWDER to interfere with POW and something simple and easy for PHP serving like MAMP which will give you a full Apache/MySQL/PHP stack which you can start/stop as needed.

Now when you startup your machine POW will be running as normal, then when you need to play around with PHP you open the Terminal and type:

powder down

This will instruct POWDER to shutdown POW, remove the firewall fix and free up port 80 for MAMP. Now you can open up MAMP, tell it to use the default port 80 and work on your PHP sites

Once your finished open Terminal again and type:

powder up

This will instruct POWDER to resurrect POW, put back the firewall change and leave everything as normal so you can go ahead developing rails apps easily.

It’s a bit of a dirty hack but will keep you from pulling your hair out and burning time off that would be better spent on client work.

Thanks Rodreegez