As I mentioned in my prior post OS X Command-line Dev Tools—Install Shortcut, OS X comes with a variety of built-in tools suited for developers. Unfortunately, Apple has seen fit to hide one of the most important of them: the web server. Despite that, they are easily unlocked if you know how. This applies to Mountain Lion (10.8) and (though I haven’t tried it, yet) Mavericks (10.9). Though you can install separate installations, I don’t like to install anything extra, unless I must.

Apache Web Server

The OSXDaily.com article “Start an Apache Web Server in Mac OS X Mavericks & Mountain Lion“.  The key is knowing the command-line command (run from Terminal):

[bash light=”true”]
sudo apachectl start
[/bash]

This will start the built-in Apache web server. The system will remember the setting and restart the server across reboots.

• The source directory for the machine’s root (http://localhost/) is in /Library/WebServer/Documents.
• User-specific content, accessible via http://localhost/~user, is in ~/Site.
• Logs are in /private/var/log/apache2/
• PHP is also available, but needs to be activated.

See the article, linked above, for details on how to set things up.

Activating Built-in PHP Support

Now that you have the built-in Apache running, you might want to enable the built-in PHP support.

1. Edit httpd.conf
2. Search for “php” and uncomment that line,

   [code light=”true”]
   LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
   [/code]

3. Add to httpd.conf before dir_module’s definition of DirectoryIndex:

   [code light=”true”]
   <IfModule mod_php5.c>
       DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm
   </IfModule>
   [/code]

4. To configure PHP server:

   [bash light=”true”]
   cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini
   [/bash]

5. Restart Apache:

   [bash light=”true”]
   sudo apachectl restart
   [/bash]

6. To update PHP on OS X, in-place from 5.3 (http://php-osx.liip.ch/). This only updates the Apache version, adjustments have to be made reference the updated version of php from the command-line.
   PHP 5.3

   [bash light=”true”]
   curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.3
   [/bash]

   PHP 5.4

   [bash light=”true”]
   curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.4
   [/bash]

   PHP 5.5

   [bash light=”true”]
   curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.5
   [/bash]

See Also:

How to Enable PHP in Apache for Mac OS X Yosemite & Mavericks