Skip to content

Install and configure Apache, PHP, and MySQL on macOS Sierra

Fair warning: Today's tip is over-the-top geeky.

After many years of not doing anything with web serving on my local Mac, I recently had a need to look at some mySQL/PHP-based web packages. While I could install these on robservatory as tests, I generally like to install things locally first, because I'll install a handful of packages until I find the one I like. But it'd been so long, I didn't have anything configured. (Remember when enabling Apache—i.e. web sharing—was a feature of the System Preferences' Sharing panel? Ah, good times!)

I could have opted to use the built-in Apache, but I wanted something that I could more easily keep up to date, and that, if I chose, would be easy to remove. The good news is that Homebrew has packages available for Apache, PHP, and MySQL. Homebrew installs everything in its own directory tree, and adding and removing packages is simple—exactly the setup I wanted.

So in theory, installation was as easy as three brew tap commands. The reality, though, is that the installation is a bit more complex. OK, it's a lot more complex. The good news is that, this being the age of the internet, help is but a search away. Or the advice of a friend away, which is what I used in this case.

A friend pointed me to this excellent installion guide that walks through the entire process, including installing two versions of PHP with the ability to switch between them on the fly.

It was this on-the-fly switching, though, that gave me troubles: I couldn't get a site to load unless I specified "index.php" or "index.html" as part of the URL. (Apache is configured to grab those files automatically.) Solving that one took a bit of time…

The problem appeared to be the ProxyPassMatch line in the virtual hosts file; if I put the full URL into that line, without the trailing "index" bit, then it worked fine. Some web searching eventually led me to this page, which explained you really shouldn't use ProxyPassMatch. Instead, the author recommends this construct:

<FilesMatch \.php$>
SetHandler "proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9000"
</FilesMatch>

So I switched over to that, and now everything's running fine: I have virtual hosts set up to run the packages I want to look at, all running locally and with packages that I can easily update, disable, or remove.