Web-Dev Uber-Configuration on Mac OS X

Mac OS X is an excellent web-development platform if you ask most (except if you ask Windows fanatics). It’s UNIX based, comes with Apache 1.3 pre-installed and ready to rock ‘n’ roll basically. But the default factory settings for Apache and more generally don’t fill all the requirements of the average web-developer, so you change settings, install this, install that, customize a few more things, and before long you’re not sure what you did and where sometimes. And this becomes a problem if/when it comes time to reinstall OSX on your little baby, or simply when your old baby is to old and ugly and you throw it out the window from the 4th floor head first in favor of a brand new and cute little baby. *evil grin*

Whatever the reason, it’s always a pain in the ass to reinstall a system, specially when you’ve installed and reconfigured a lot of background daemons and services. Hence I thought I’d share my method of configuration which makes it quite easy just lifting it all from one system to another.

What I’m gonna outline here is installing PHP 5, MySQL and additional tools, and reconfiguring apache the way I’ve done it.

So lets start by downloading PHP 5 for your system from here: http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/php/

It’s a no brainer, just extract the tar.gz archive and double click the .pkg installer package and follow instructions. This will leave you with a working PHP install located in /usr/local/php5/.

Then lets move on to MySQL, download the package for your system here: http://mysql.org/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#Mac*OS_X*(package_format)

Again, its an easy .pkg installation. Optionally, you can install the preference pane which is an easy way to start and stop MySQL. If you want the MySQL daemon to run at system startup, use the .pkg startup item installer, as the option in the preference pane doesn’t seem to work at all :P

The MySQL GUI Tools are very useful, and are available here: http://mysql.org/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html#OSX

As for Apache, there’s a few things to do, first of all you should make sure you’ve turned on “Personal Web Sharing” under the Sharing preference panel in System Preferences. Next we’re gonna add a single line to Apache’s configuration file. Use any text editor of your choice, to open /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, you can use the terminal based pico editor by running this in a terminal:

sudo pico /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

Then right at the bottom of the file, add the following on a new line (if you’re using pico, you can quickly scroll down using ctrl+v):

Include /Users/username/Library/httpd/*.conf

Obviously, make sure to replace username with your own username. The idea here is that we have apache automatically include all .conf files located in your own ~/Library/httpd/ folder.

Now, before we do anything else, I recommend you open your ~/Sites/ folder with the finder, create a new folder called _public, and move everything inside your Sites folder into the newly created _public folder. We’re gonna reconfigure your _public folder to be Apache’s root directory rather than /Library/WebServer/Documents.

Then open the ~/Library/ folder in your home folder, and create a folder named httpd, in there lets create _main.conf, and put this in it (the Listen settings you don’t really need unless you want them):

DocumentRoot "/Users/username/Sites/_public"
Listen 80
Listen 3000
Listen 8080

Again, replace username with your own username. Save the file, and run the following command in the terminal and enter your password when asked to relaunch Apache.

sudo apachectl graceful

Open http://localhost/ in a web browser, and you should see the contents of your own _public folder :)

Then you can continue to create an aliases.conf, virtual_hosts.conf and more in ~/Library/httpd/ and apache will automatically include them. This way, you only need to do a single modification to the bottom of httpd.conf on any new system aswell, and just place your config files in the correct dir, and you’re ready to rock ‘n’ roll ;)

What I’ve also done myself, is that I create virtual hosts for the different projects I’m working on. So lets say I’ve got a new project now called “Banjo”, then I would create ~/Sites/banjo/ and I’d create a virtual host entry in virtual_hosts.conf that looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;ServerName banjo
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;DocumentRoot "/Users/username/Sites/banjo"
</VirtualHost>

Then I open /etc/hosts with a text editor, and I create a new entry which looks like this:

127.0.0.1 banjo

Once all is saved and done, I restart Apache with sudo apachectl graceful, open http://banjo/ in a web browser, and I’m all set to create another world dominating merciless enemy business killing machine of a site… Heh

Myself I’ve got phpMyAdmin installed in ~/Sites/_public/mysql/, which makes it accessible at http://localhost/mysql/. Also, I have a virtual host configured, and a entry in the hosts file so I can also access from http://mysql/ :D

Then of course, I use TextMate, and I’ve got a TextMate project with all the Apache and PHP configuration files, which I can quickly open using Quicksilver by pressing cmd+space and typing httpd and pressing return cause the project file is called httpd. But the rest of my workflow is a story for another time ;)

I hope some of you have found this useful, saionara fili moy…