Setting up a Web Development Environment in Tiger

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Last week I started the upgrade Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” around the house. To my pleasant surprise, it went extremely smoothly. The most tedious and frustrating part was waiting for my newly enclosed external hard drive to copy tens of gigs of files back and forth for 2 machines.

The upgrade was an excellent opportunity to clean house and back up. Something my Powerbook was sorely in need of. After the install, the ease of copying my Home directory and a handful of required applications (NetNewsWire, Transmit, VooDooPad, BluePhoneElite, Skype, SubEthaEdit, Quicksilver) back to the laptop meant I was 85% back to normal almost immediately.

The tough part was getting the web development playground set up; I’ve still got a week left in the 21 days of Ruby, and I’m lost without a local install of PHP.

After un-commenting the PHP modules in Tiger’s default Apache install and setting the permissions on the items within the /WebServer/Documents directory to 666, PHP was working as expected.

After that, Ruby, Rails, and MySQL. For this, I highly recommend TextDrive’s About “Setting up a development environment on my Mac”. It walked me through everything and like everything at TextDrive – straight-forward and friendly. As of this writing, some of the items are specific to 10.3 “Panther” and I was able to skip over those with no consequence. Without it, I’d still be googling for a good tutorial on setting everything up. Now, I’m ready to rebuild my seemingly broken WishRSS.