Starry Hope » PHP

Mac OS X Installation Instructions That Don’t Suck! (Rails, Lighttpd, MySQL, Apache2, PHP5)

Jim — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 09:17:21 +0000

I had to reinstall my computer the other day, it’s needed it for a while (mostly because I’ve installed every stupid program I could get my hands on for the last 6 months). I haven’t wanted to reinstall because I had a “working” install of Rails and I remembered how hard it was to install last time.

After reinstalling OS X 10.4.5, I started looking for some good instructions on installing Rails. A google search will quickly find about 15 different “suggestions”. Many people suggest using Fink or Darwinports … others have different ways of doing.

Then, I found somewhere on the Rails site, a link to these instructions by Dan Benjamin. Finally, instructions for installing Rails on OS X that don’t suck! Sure, you have to compile most of the apps yourself, but in the end, you get a solid Rails, Lighttpd, MySQL install that should be safe from OS upgrades and the likes. Besides that, you get to learn something along the way.

Following Dan’s suggestion, I also wanted to find a way to install Apache 2 and PHP 5 into /usr/local/. I searched around a bit and found a tutorial by James Pelow over at phpmac.com. I used his instructions as a base for installing Apache 2 and PHP 5. I made sure to download the newest versions of software (the ones he listed are a bit old) and also make sure to install everything in /usr/local/ — works like a charm!

So, now I have a working Apache2/PHP5/MySQL/SQLite setup and also a working Rails/Lighttpd/MySQL setup on the same mac (mini) … and for once, I actually have the feeling that I understand what I’ve done and why it works.

Why I Want To Learn PHP

Jim — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 05:52:11 +0000

For those of you who know me, and know my past work on the web, the idea of me learning PHP may shock you. Why would I do such a thing? I’ve always preferred ASP to PHP and spent a good chunk of last year learning ASP.NET and VB.NET! I just finished building a website that uses ASP.NET exclusively. I may have even spent some time trying to convince you to learn ASP.NET. Well, while I’m not about to throw ASP.NET out the window anytime soon, but I do plan to do my next few projects in PHP … here are a few reasons why:

Reason number 1: MONEY.

I’ve spent the last 8 months working at a non-profit organization (need I say more?). At this organization we have a certain number of computers and software licenses. New computers, or money for new software is nowhere in the foreseeable future. To run ASP.NET, you need a Windows server license and a pretty modern computer to run it on. What do I have available? Well, I think that old Pentium I in the corner will work just fine – install Linux, Apache, PHP and mySQL and it’ll be good to go. No new hardware costs, and no new software costs either (all open-source and freely downloadable).

Reason number 2: STABILITY.

At above mentioned non-profit organization, we have a Windows 2000 Server. It controls pretty much our whole network and is considered the most important computer in the building. It’s also a broken piece of junk! Every time I turn on the monitor, the thing has a whole screen full of errors. Whole sections of the OS don’t work properly anymore and it’s barely alive at all. We’re currently working on moving the network to a new main server, but MS didn’t exactly make that process easy … so we’re about to go insane.

While messing with this (and many other) Windows problem, I suddenly realized something. You know, we have another very important server in the office, it handles all of our Internet access, logging, firewall, mail server, and a few other tasks. This server sits there and runs day after day without needing any attention. Who knows when the last time was that we actually turned the monitor on? It just works! And guess what, it doesn’t run Windows! Nope, this baby runs FreeBSD, a free (imagine that) UNIX-like operating system similar to Linux. Then I remembered that I used to rent a Linux server where I hosted about 50 domain names for my hosting company. This computer had a whole whopping 16MB of RAM and a pretty slow processor … and it ran Linux. I had the server for over 2 years and only rebooted it about 3 times, and only once because I needed to. Starting to see a pattern? Why on earth did I ever start programing on a MS platform? What was I thinking?

Reason number 3: AVAILABILITY.

This one is pretty simple. ASP.NET runs on Microsoft Windows Servers with IIS 4 or 5 and the .NET Framework. PHP can run pretty much ANYWHERE. It can run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, many other forms of �??Unix�?� and, get this, even on Windows! Why should I waste my time developing my skills in languages that tie me to a (not so great) OS?

PHP 5 – The Easy Way

Jim — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 05:25:01 +0000

As you probably know, PHP 5.0 was just released a few days ago. I’ve been keeping an eye on this new PHP release because it looks like the community has made some great improvements. The main things that interest me are a new object-oriented model (it’s about time!), better xml support (again, about time!) and a built-in database program (sqlite). I’ve quite honestly become attached to asp.net, mostly because of it’s completely smooth object-oriented approach to things that lets me separate my code from my html … so hopefully the new version of PHP will make life easier on PHP users. Anyway, if there was ever a time to learn PHP, it’s now.

So, now what? You need to install PHP and mySQL (and maybe Apache too) … but what a pain! Well, the guys over at Wampserver have a solution that will help you get your testing server up and running in no time. It’s called Wampserver and it installs and configures Apache, PHP 5, mySQL, and PHPmyadmin all with one speedy installer! Besides that, it gives you a nifty little tray application to help control and configure all those apps. I had it up and running on my Windows 2000 testing server in about 3 minutes. Thanks Wampserver! Now all I have to do is actually learn PHP 5 :-)