I thought I'd write up the steps I took to get Drupal running on a stock Leopard installation. You may wish to save some time and install MAMP instead. Especially if you need GD support (i.e., you're going to have Drupal do image resizing). Update 17-Dec-2007: In fact, I recommend using MAMP instead.
Step 1: Enable PHP
Uncomment line 114 in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to enable Leopard's built-in PHP:
LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
Start Apache 2 by using the Sharing panel in Preferences or at the command line with the following:
sudo apachectl start
(If Apache was already running, use restart instead of start.)
Place a test document into the default htdocs root to see if php is running. I created /Library/WebServer/Documents/phpinfo.php with the following content:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
Now going to http://localhost/phpinfo.php shows me the info page for PHP 5.2.4. Yay!
Step 2: Friendly Virtual Hosts in Apache
I don't like keeping my websites in /Library/WebServer/Documents. It's a cumbersome place; I'd much rather keep them in /Users/john/Sites. That's right in my home directory and when I copy or sync my home directory I get the sites I'm working on, too. But using Leopard's built-in URL support for my home directory is verbose, too:
http://localhost/~john/sitename
I'd much rather use a nice short URL like http://dev/sitename. So first I assigned the name dev to my computer by adding a line to /etc/hosts:
##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 dev
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
...
Since Leopard caches DNS queries, we force it to reread /etc/hosts by using dscacheutil which replaces the lookupd utility that was in OS X 10.4.
dscacheutil -flushcache
I changed /etc/apache2/users/john.conf from
<Directory "/Users/john/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
to
<Directory "/Users/john/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
# Allow .htaccess files to override httpd.conf.
AllowOverride All
# No access allowed.
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
# Except from this machine.
Allow from 127.0.0.1
</Directory>
# Enable virtual hosts.
NameVirtualHost *:80
# Point virtual host to our directory.
<Virtualhost *:80>
DocumentRoot /Users/john/Sites
Servername dev
</Virtualhost>
You can test that everything works and you didn't make any typos by using
sudo apachectl configtest
which should tell you that the syntax of your Apache configuration files is OK (it will point you to the line containing the error otherwise). If all is OK, restart Apache to effect the changes:
sudo apachectl restart
Now you should be able to go to http://dev/ in your browser, and the file at /Users/john/Sites/index.html should be displayed.
Installing MySQL
There was no friendly installer for OS X 10.5 so I used the OS X package for 10.4. It ran fine.
It was unclear from my web searches whether the startup item for MySQL is working on Leopard. So I created the following file at /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist to autostart MySQL (thanks Joannou Ng):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>KeepAlive</key>
<true/>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.mysql.mysqld</string>
<key>Program</key>
<string>/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe</string>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>
Before I restarted, I wanted to make sure that mysql would be in my PATH environment variable when I restart. So I created a file at /etc/paths.d/mysql containing
/usr/local/mysql/bin
For more information on this, type man path_helper.
Then I restarted to make sure that MySQL would launch. Yes, it's running:
ps -ax | grep my
40 ?? 0:00.01 /bin/sh /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe
88 ?? 0:00.11 /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld --basedir=/usr/local/mysql --datadir=/usr/local/mysql/data --user=mysql --pid-file=/usr/local/mysql/data/localhost.pid
Now to set it up securely.
mysql_secure_installation
This allows you to set a root password, disallow remote root logins, and generally tighten up MySQL security.
It's nice to be able to tweak MySQL parameters, so I created a my.cnf file:
sudo cp /usr/local/mysql/support-files/my-large.cnf /etc/my.cnf
The only thing I tweaked in the my.cnf file was to add one line under the [mysqld] heading to prevent MySQL from listening on port 3306 (I don't like unnecessary open ports):
skip-networking
Now I can create a database for Drupal to use:
mysql -uroot -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE drupaldb;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
One more thing. PHP and MySQL are confused about which socket to use (/tmp/mysql.sock vs. /var/mysql/mysql.sock). So let's provide a symlink so they can use either one:
sudo mkdir /var/mysql
sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock
Installing Drupal
Pull down a copy of Drupal 5 from the CVS repository:
cd ~/Sites
cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal checkout -r DRUPAL-5 drupal
Change permissions on the settings file so the installer can modify it:
chmod o+w drupal/sites/default/settings.php
Run the Drupal installer by going to http://dev/drupal.
Remove the permissions from the settings file:
chmod o-w drupal/sites/default/settings.php
And create Drupal's files directory:
mkdir /Users/john/Sites/drupal/files
sudo chown www /Users/john/Sites/drupal/files
Rejoicing
Now I've got an easy setup where I can create my Drupal sites under /Users/john/Sites and refer to them with short names like http://dev/foo. MySQL is running nicely. Public access to my dev sites is disabled by Apache. Life is good.
