PHP and MySQL on Mac OS X Lion with Homebrew

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