Setup Web Dev Env in MacBook

Since Apple’s MacBook notebook uses OS/X that is built on top of Unix, it’s very like a server environment (while in Windows, we need to install something like Cygwin). So we can use this as a development environment. The problem is that it’s not so apparent to find where and how Apple organizes the things. For web development, it’s as follows:

Apache2

Apache2 is pre-installed.

• script: apachectl (in path)
• config: /etc/apache2/*
• htdocs: /Users/<user_id>/Sites
• URL: http://localhost/~user_id/
• log: /var/log/apache2/*

PHP

PHP 5 is also pre-installed, we need to enable it in Apache’s config file: uncomment the line with ‘php’:

LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

add php type in “<IfModule mime_module>” block as follows:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Restart Apache, we can pass the php test by creating a test.php as follows and put it in ‘Sites’ dir:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Perl & CGI

Now comes the good-old Perl CGI. According to Apache’s configuration, the CGI dir is “/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables”, it’s mapped to URL “http://localhost/cgi-bin”. To make it easier, we can create a soft link in home dir:

ln -s /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables Cgi

Now it can be tested with following script:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT

print "Content-Type: text/plain\n\n";

print "Hello CGI!\n";

mod_perl

Add following lines in proper  places:

 # load it
 LoadModule perl_module        libexec/apache2/mod_perl.so

# add a place to test mod_perl scripts
 ScriptAliasMatch ... (omitted, refer to the CGI one)

 <Directory "/var/www/cgi-bin/mod_perl">
 SetHandler perl-script
 PerlHandler ModPerl::Registry
 Options +ExecCGI
 PerlOptions +ParseHeaders
 </Directory>

Now we are pretty much done. The only remaining thing that is good to have is MySQL…