In each of my posts on setting up a local development environment on OS X, it's mentioned that you need to add your website's domain, even though it's local, in your /etc/hosts file. My preferred way to edit the hosts file on OS X is using Gas Mask. If you wanted to create the local virtual host projectx.dev, you would add the line 127.0.0.1 projectx.dev in /etc/hosts or with Gas Mask, and then use that same value in either ServerName in Apache or server_name in Nginx. This can be tedious for adding new sites. Luckily there's a way to set this up once and then never have to edit your hosts file again for adding new local virtual hosts.

In my previous post, I walked through how to set up a local environment using Nginx running on port 8080 so as to avoid running anything as root or with sudo. Something that I've found incredibly annoying is when I forget to specify the port I get an error in my browser, or Chrome might even suggest something based on a search term. It's fairly easy though to configure Apache to route everything to another port.

Nginx is quickly becoming a popular, low resource alternative to Apache for many websites. This doesn't come without challenges, such as using PHP as CGI due to not having mod_php available. Nginx also does not use any Apache configuration rules, nor does it use .htaccess or anything like it, so it requires additional configuration regardless of the web application being deployed. A big help in getting Nginx started with Drupal is António P. P. Almeida's drupal-with-nginx configuration, which makes it fairly simple to deploy in Linux. But what about local development on OS X? Read on to learn get all of the required components set up for your system, as well as the modifications necessary to get drupal-with-nginx set up on OS X.

The preferred way to install node and NPM seems to be installing from source, but I'm a perennial fan of using packages to keep things tidy, especially if I need to uninstall something. I started by going to the Node.js download page, and through to Installing with a package manager. I installed the yum release RPM for the tchol.org repository as directed and installed nodejs and npm with yum. From there, I ran into two problems but thankfully they were fairly easy to resolve.

OS X Lion comes with most of the tools you would need to do "MAMP" (Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP) development, as outlined in my previous posts once you add a database. So then why would you want to use MacPorts? Setting your development environment up in MacPorts isolates the binaries, libraries, and configuration files, completely separate from the existing OS X install (with the exception of startup scripts). You can also tweak the configuration files on your own, apply your own patches, and apply updates that MacPorts may get before Apple pushes them. It will take more time because you'll be compiling everything, but you have all of the control. Read on for how to get things set up.

OS X Lion ships with Apache and PHP, which both require a little bit of tweaking to get fully-functional for "MAMP" local development. The one thing Lion does not ship with is a database. This will be very similar to my previous post on local development but this time we'll be using Homebrew to install either MySQL or MariaDB for the database. Since we'll be using a compiler for Homebrew, I'll also cover how to add APC and other PECL modules that you can add to OS X.

With the release of Lion, there are some subtle differences to setting up a local MAMP (Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment compared to Snow Leopard. In an effort to keep this from being overly wordy and just get to the good stuff, we'll dive right in, so read on to get started.

It seems to be standard for Drupal, at least in version 6, that Watchdog is enabled and used to write errors/warnings/notices to the watchdog table in the database. Depending on the verbosity of your PHP output, amount of 404s, or other information that would be going into this log, it could mean a lot of writes on your database. While you should trace errors/warnings and solve them, sometimes you may want this increased information for debugging. If your site receives a lot of traffic, this could mean decreased database performance. A solution to this is to instead utilize the core Syslog module instead of Watchdog. Here's how I got it set up in Drupal 6 on CentOS 5 servers.

We're big fans of Drush. It's installed on all of our servers and it's a great way to perform maintenance tasks, download core and modules, and much much more. I'm not a big fan of installing from zip files though, so let's use git to easily keep our Drush install up to date.

Here's a one-liner to dump each table in a database to it's own .sql file. Crack open your shell of choice and follow along.

On Snow Leopard, you can install drush without using sudo. A dependency for installing drush is downloading a Pear library. The following example should allow you to be able to use the following commands to install drush to /usr/local/drush with a symlink in /usr/local/bin/drush, but it fails on the 'pear download' step, even though it's writing to a user-writeable directory. Read on the figure out how to fix this annoying problem.

I had previously written a post on one method of upgrading PHP from 5.1 to 5.2 on CentOS and Red Hat servers by creating new RPMs. Since then, I have found a much better way to create PHP 5.2.17 (or newer) RPMs to easily upgrade (and later remove, if you want) the older version available by default. I'll presume you have no prior experience building PHP RPMs.

In addition to hosting Drupal sites, we also host a number of WordPress sites. Similar to checking all of our Drupal core versions, we needed an easy way to quickly see what versions we are running on all of our WordPress sites. Kudos to Ethan for getting this one kicked off; here is a bash script to check your definable $WEBHOME (where you deposit all of your WordPress webroots) and scan for WordPress versions.

At EchoDitto, we host a lot of Drupal sites. Just about all of our web servers contain more than one completely separate Drupal cores since we develop most of our websites independently. We also keep an eye out on Drupal Security and when to apply core updates. Since we're not using Aegir, nor do we run every site off of a single multi-site core install, we need a quick and easy way to see what versions we're running.

Apple OS X comes with Apache and PHP built-in but need some tweaking to work. It also does not come with MySQL. Because of this, many developers have chosen to use MacPorts, Homebrew, or MAMP to install new binaries for Apache, PHP, and MySQL. However, doing this means your system would have multiple copies of Apache and PHP on your machine, and could create conflicts depending on how your built-in tools are configured. This tutorial will show you how to get the built-in versions of Apache and PHP running with an easy to install version of MySQL.