Apache not starting in MAMP (but MySQL working) in OSX

Stoping the Apache solved this issue for me, using the command-line:

sudo apachectl stop

For those of you upgrading to Yosemite there seems to be a bug which I don't really understand but its easily fixed as posted on their twitter account.

Workaround for the 10.10 Preview 5 bug: Rename the file “envvars” located in '/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin' into “_envvars” (@mamp_en)

I had a similar problem and could solve it by starting on the command line the apachectl included in MAMP:

$ /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/apachectl start

which would yield

Syntax error on line 427 of /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf:
Invalid command '\xef\xbf\xbc#AllowOverride', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

This error message was nowhere else, not in any log file or system console. (Turns out I had copied a line from a documentation file which had copied some special characters that were not intended for my system - how easy to find is that!)

This is for MAMP 2.0.1, maybe it's handled better in newer versions.