localhosting fun
so, i’ve been building up a little localhosting setup for osx. this way i can get things to a working stage before fiddling with my nice, stable production environment.
i had a bit of help from these links, which you may find useful.
setting up a local development environment on osx
installing lighttpd on osx
first, install the latest mysql. there’s an os x installer which even comes with a handy preference pane for starting/stopping the server. you’ll want to add this to your path:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/
since i’ve been exploring ruby on rails lately, i also grabbed the latest ruby. at this point you’ll have two versions of ruby so you might want to rename your older version like this:
sudo mv /usr/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby16
after that install rubygems (a simple unpack and install).
tar zxvf rubygems-0.8.4.tgz
cd rubygems-0.8.4
ruby setup.rb
from here it’s easy to install all kinds of ruby apps like rails. to install the latest stable rails just type:
sudo gem install rails
and say “Y” to its dependencies.
at this point, i could have stopped and just used apache (it is the server that’s used for my homepage kweerious.com, but i was curious about lighttpd. i grabbed lighttpd-1.3.13, and compiled it with these options
./configure --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin --with-openssl
it compiled, but i haven’t got mysql virtual hosting working yet. it’s fast though and so well…light. the config file i made is tiny and it works for simple vhosts out of my Sites/rails directory. so, now i have that running instead of Apache (you can shut it off with
/System/Library/Startup Items/Apache/Apache stop
then add a few “virtual” sites to
/etc/hosts. for example, to get dev.bickr.com working for me i added:
127.0.0.1 dev.bickr.com
just at the end. this way i can get firefox to point at my localhost instead of contacting the real bickr.com.
now to get to codin’!
As always, you rock,
-lyle
Lyle Troxell replied at Mar 17, 07:24 AM