How I Fixed the Orange WAMP Tray Icon, Turned it Green Easy and Fast

If you’re about to start WordPress development on your local machine using WAMP, you might run across the same issue I had: The WAMP system tray icon was orange, and hovering over it displayed only 2 out of 3 services running. Here’s how I fixed it fast.

Doing a search online will send you into a bunch of different places, but let me tell you first about the problem I had and then the solution to fix it.

Upon installation, and once I ran WAMP for the first time, I immediately got the orange icon, which means WAMP is not fully running.

Just in case you don’t know, a red icon means it’s not running at all. Orange means it’s partially running, and a green icon means it’s completely running.

There are three main services required to run WAMP successfully on your local machine:

1. MariaDB
2. MySQL
3. Apache

I noticed in my case only two of three services were running: MariaDB and MySQL. But how did I find out which services were running and which were not?

I simply selected Stop All services. Then, I started to enable one by one starting with MariaDB > Service Administration submenu > Start/Resume Service. I then hovered over the WAMP system tray icon, it said 1 of 3 services running turning the icon from red to orange.

Then I did the same thing with MySQL > Service Administration submenu > Start/Resume Service. Now it said 2 of 3 services running while the icon remained at orange.

Finally, I tried to turn on Apache and I got the following black screen:

Your port 80 is actually used by :

Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0

Cannot install the Apache service, please stop this application and try again.

Press Enter to exit...

So right there I knew being unable to run Apache was the culprit. So after spending some time searching for the issue. The best solution was this:

Port 80 was in use, it’s known to be a regular issue with these installations.

So to solve it I went to the WAMP icon, under Apache you will find the httpd.conf file link. I opened it up and simply edited it to replace all instances of port 80 to 8080, I found a total of 4 instances.

Once I did this, I saved the file and started the Apache service again.

Voila! The icon turned green and I was good to go.

UPdate

Although this fixed the icon turning it green from orange. I experienced another problem. phpMyAdmin wasn’t starting.

After a few more digging I finally resolved it for good and it was even easier.

I right-clicked the WAMP icon > Tools > Use a port other than 80

It took me to another dialog box suggesting 8080, I said ok, and again…Voila! Worked like a charm.