Getting Started

First, open the Terminal app and switch to the root user to avoid permission issues while running these commands.

sudo su

Enable Apache on Mac OS X

apachectl start

Verify It works! by accessing http://localhost

Enable PHP for Apache

First, make a backup of the default Apache configuration. This is good practice and serves as a comparison against future versions of Mac OS X.

cd /etc/apache2/
cp httpd.conf httpd.conf.bak

Now edit the Apache configuration.

sudo nano httpd.conf

Uncomment the following line (remove #):

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Restart Apache:

apachectl restart

You can verify PHP is enabled by creating a phpinfo() page in your DocumentRoot.

The default DocumentRoot for Mac OS X Yosemite is /Library/WebServer/Documents. You can verify this from your Apache configuration.

grep DocumentRoot httpd.conf

Now create the phpinfo.php page in your DocumentRoot in /Library/WebServer/Documents/phpinfo.php

<?php 
echo 'phpinfo();’
?>

Verify PHP by accessing http://localhost/phpinfo.php

Install MySQL on Mac OS X

  1. Download the MySQL DMG for Mac OS X
  2. Install MySQL

Once installed, to reduce the bulk of work to create aliases for each mysql command, the environment path needs to be added in .bash_profile file. This file normally resides in

/Users/yourusername/.bash_profile

If you can’t see this file just create one.

nano /Users/yourusername/.bash_profile/
export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH

Note: After adding environment path you need to logout and login back into your system to take effect.

Additionally, it is a good practice to run mysql_secure_installation.

Connect PHP and MySQL

Now time to ensure PHP and MySQL can communicate with one another. So, do the following:

cd /var 
mkdir mysql
cd mysql
ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock mysql.sock

Additional Configuration (optional)

The default configuration for Apache 2.4 on OS X Yosemite seemed pretty lean. For example, common modules like mod_rewrite were disabled. You may consider enabling this now to avoid forgetting they are disabled in the future.

Open Apache Configration:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

And uncomment the following lines (remove #):

LoadModule deflate_module libexec/apache2/mod_deflate.so
LoadModule expires_module libexec/apache2/mod_expires.so
LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so

Note: Previous version of Mac OS X ran Apache 2.2. If you upgraded OS X and previously configured Apache, you may want to read more about upgrading to to Apache 2.4 from Apache 2.2.

If you develop multiple projects and would like each to have a unique url, you can configure Apache VirtualHosts for Mac OS X.

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ApacheYosemiteWeb Server

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