PHP and MySQL on Mac OS X Lion with Homebrew

Ben Atkin — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 04:32:39 +0000

I got PHP and MySQL working together on my MacBook Pro with Mac OS X Lion tonight. I’m using the MySQL server that I installed with Homebrew. Homebrew doesn’t come with Apache or PHP due to its policy of avoiding including packages that are already installed on OS X. Because of that, I’m using the included Web Sharing, which I enabled in the Sharing Preference Pane under System Preferences.

I’m posting what I did below. I found a more thorough guide when I got stuck on a step. Please consider using that, as it covers much more, including getting PEAR set up.

Here are the steps that I remember taking, to get WordPress running locally:

Install MySQL using Homebrew (brew install mysql)
Since I added something to my /etc/apache2/httpd.conf that caused Web Sharing to fail to start, I copied /etc/apache2/original/httpd.conf to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, and that fixed it.
Turn on Web Sharing in the Sharing Preference Pane
Uncomment the line that starts with LoadModule php5_module in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf
Since I didn’t want all of my files in ~/Sites, I enabled redirects in my user php file, /etc/apache2/users/bat.conf, by adding FollowSymlinks to the Options.
Add a symlink to the WordPress directory (~/Sites/blog in my case) and set up the database
Go to the directory in the browser (http://localhost/~bat/blog/ in my case)
My database connection didn’t work despite my username, password, and hostname being correct. After some googling I found that I needed to change all instances of /var/mysql/mysql.sock in /etc/php.ini to /tmp/mysql.sock
Fix the WordPress site url in the database

Ben Atkin — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:24:54 +0000

I’m going to experiment with doing microblog summaries and putting content in a directory. For now I’m putting them on twitter tagged with #blog, copying the content, and expanding them just a bit. The full articles will simply be directories containing an index.php or index.html file. That way I can play around with the layout of individual posts, or make the pages dirt simple if I so desire.

Image editing with php & GD is simple and fun. I removed text from a SlimTimer Fluid icon I found on flickr with it.

Ben Atkin's Self-Hosted Blog » php

PHP and MySQL on Mac OS X Lion with Homebrew