Browse other questions tagged apache permissions osx-mountain-lion or ask your own question. The Overflow Blog The Loop- September 2020: Summer Bridge to Tech for Kids. XAMPP is the most popular PHP development environment. XAMPP is a completely free, easy to install Apache distribution containing MariaDB, PHP, and Perl. The XAMPP open source package has been set up to be incredibly easy to install and to use. I tried setting up WordPress on a Mac, I got Apache running, PHP is up and going and MySQL is running. I put WordPress in library/webserver/documents and I visit localhost/wordpress/wp-admin to do.

Mac OS X serves as an excellent development environment, even if you are not actually developing Mac OS or iOS applications. It is the darling of many a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) developer, who enjoys a slick desktop operating system with good UNIX-like underpinnings but who don’t necessarily want to put up with all the various limitations and complications that running a Linux desktop brings, consistent improvements in this regard over recent years notwithstanding.

The only trouble with this is that if you want to develop LAMP applications and work on a Mac then traditionally you’ve needed a two-box setup; a Mac on your desk and Linux on a development server. For many this isn’t an issue, and indeed when you’ve got a team of developers, optimal, but what if you wanted a self-contained development environment that was restricted to just one box? What if you wanted that box to be your laptop so you could take it anywhere?

Solutions

“Virtual machine!”, I hear you cry. Yes, this is a possible solution, and for many works well. Good virtualisation software is free these days, but using a local VM is cumbersome. Not only does it consume a large slice of your RAM but it also puts a lot of strain on the CPU, meaning that if you are running off your battery your battery life will be decreased. It’s also cumbersome; you have to start up the VM when you need it and there can be complications with the networking, for example, if you have connected to a public wireless network it’s possible that your VM might not be extended the same resource.

There is a software package for Mac OS called MAMP (the M for Mac OS replacing the L for Linux). This is a point-and-click installer which bundles Apache, Linux and PHP for installation on Mac OS. I don’t like this solution, for a number of reasons, including:

1. Limited functionality unless you “go pro” (at quite considerable cost). Any self-respecting developer will require multiple virtual hosts as a minimum and won’t need or want a clicky-button interface to get what they want.
2. You are entirely at the mercy of the distributors of MAMP with regards to component software versions that are made available to you and when.

Alternative solution

There’s an alternative to this. You don’t have to fork out £39 for a package of what it otherwise freely and widely available software. With the help of my friend and colleague Ben Nimmo I present the following assembled and tested instructions for turning your Mac into a native MAMP server without using the packages download.

MySQL

1. Download and install the latest .dmg and install both the *.pkgs within it (don’t use the TAR/GZ archives). You may wish to install the Workbench too, it’s really good these days.
2. Find where the mysql.sock file is expected to be in /etc/php.ini (should be /var/mysql/mysql.sock)
3. Create the folder and link the socket file to the expected location.

4. Add MySQL to command line by editing /Users/username/.bash_profile and adding this line and then either restarting terminal or source-ing the file:

PHP

PHP comes with Mac OS, so it’s not necessary to download and install it, however, there are a couple of necessary steps to configure it:

1. Copy the default php.ini file:

2. Edit /etc/php.ini and uncomment this line to enable xdebug (not essential, but recommended):

Apache

Apache too comes with Mac OS, so again, no need to download and install it. Its configuration, however, is a little more complex, but nothing scary. The described configuration will provide a special Apache “sandbox” environment for your projects. It uses the existing “Sites” directory in your Mac OS home directory.

1. Create a subdirectory in this directory for each of your projects, ensuring that the directory name does not contain any characters that would be illegal in a URL. Within each of these subdirectories create another subdirectory called “web”; this will be become the web root of each project. The extra subdirectory is in case you wish to use a framework in your projects which may keep some of its files outside of the web server root (Symfony is a good example of this).
2. Create a subdirectory called “logs” in your “Sites” directory; Apache will maintain two log files, access and error, for all the sandbox sites.
3. Enable PHP5 with Apache by editing /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and uncomment the following line:

4. Change the user and group to your username and “staff” respectively, also in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:

5. While still in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, find the following configuration and change “Deny from all” to “Allow from all”:

6. Create and edit /etc/apache/users/user.conf with the following, changing “sbf” to the username:

7. Restart Apache:

Then, for each of your sites, add an entry in /etc/hosts for with the format “name.dev.local” pointing to 127.0.0.1, where name corresponds to a subdirectory in your “Sites” directory. Don’t forget that the public subdirectory of each site is assumed to be “web”, so make a symlink to this if the framework you use has a different convention.

You should then be able to access each of your sites from URLs using the convention http://name.dev.local/ – where “name” again is a subdirectory within your “Sites” directory.

I’ve tested this setup procedure and It Works For Me [tm]. If, however, it doesn’t quite work for you as described, please let me know where you’re going wrong and how, if you were able, to resolve it, and I will update these instructions accordingly.

Recommend switching to Docker

I finally switched to using Docker for local development on macOS. While the following tutorial works for macOS Catalina, it has limitations. I recommend following my latest tutorial on installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP on macOS using Docker.

Note: This post assumes you followed installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL on Mac OS X Mojave and have since upgraded to macOS Catalina. If you did not follow the original post, you should follow installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL on macOS Catalina.

When Mac OS X upgrades it overwrites previous configuration files. However, before doing so it will make backups. For Catalina the original versions may have a suffix of mojave or be copied to a backup folder on the Desktop. Most of the time, configuring your system after updating Mac OS X is simply a matter of comparing the new and old configurations.

This post will look at the differences in Apache, PHP, and MySQL between Mac OS X Mojave and macOS Catalina.

Updating Apache

Mac OS X Mojave and macOS Catalina both come with Apache pre-installed. As noted above, your Apache configuration file is overwritten me when you upgrade to macOS Catalina.

There were a few differences in the configuration files. However, since both Mojave and Catalina run Apache 2.4, you could simply backup the configuration file from Catalina and overwrite it with your Mojave version.

Apache Mysql Php Windows 10

However, I encourage you to stay up-to-date. As such, you should take the time to update Catalina's Apache configuration. First, create a backup and compare the two configuration files for differences.

Now edit the Apache configuration. Feel free to use a different editor if you are not familiar with vi.

Uncomment the following line (remove #):

In addition, uncomment or add any lines you noticed from the diff above that may be needed. For example, I uncommented the following lines:

Finally, I cleaned up some of the backups that were created during the macOS Catalina upgrade. This will help avoid confusion in the future.

Note: These files were not changed between versions. However, if you changed them, you should compare the files before running the commands.

Restart Apache:

Updating PHP

Mac OS X Mojave came with PHP version 7.1 pre-installed. This PHP version has reached its end of life. macOS Catalina comes with PHP 7.3 pre-installed. If you added any extensions to PHP you will need to recompile them.

Also, if you changed the core PHP INI file it will have been overwritten when upgrading to macOS Catalina. You can compare the two files by running the following command:

Note: Your original file may note be named something else. You can see which PHP core files exist by running ls /etc/php.ini*.

I would encourage you not to change the PHP INI file directly. Instead, you should overwrite PHP configurations in a custom PHP INI file. This will prevent Mac OS X upgrades from overwriting your PHP configuration in the future. To determine the right path to add your custom PHP INI, run the following command:

Installing Apache Mysql And Php On Mac

Note: It appears Catalina does not include the PHP Zip extension. This is a popular extension used by many packages. This was one of the reasons I switched to using Docker.

Updating MySQL

Apache With Php And Mysql

MySQL is not pre-installed with Mac OS X. It is something you downloaded when following the original post. As such, the macOS Catalina upgrade should not have changed your MySQL configuration.

Apache Mysql And Php For Mac Os

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