Drupal Development On A Mac With Homebrew

Hot on the heals of my efforts to set up a Linux VM for Drupal development (and a borked up Macports installation) I ran across this article describing how to set things up on a Mac for Drupal development. Since I had already gooned up my Macports installation I decided to give it a go. After removing Macports I just did the following.

Ensure that the “Web Sharing” box is checked under the “Sharing” section in System Preferences. That enables the apache server.
Install Homebrew using the instructions on the website.
Install git and mysql (no need to install apache or php, I’m using the versions that come with OSX).
```
  brew install git
  brew -v install mysql
```

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Follow the instructions at the end of the mysql installation.

Install Drush.

  sudo pear channel-discover pear.drush.org
  sudo pear install drush/drush

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Edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and make sure the following lines are uncommented.

  LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
  Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

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Add the following line after the Include line above. The directory used here can be anything you want and can include any file pattern you want to use. I like to keep mine simple so I put in in a directory under my home directory and just include every file. Just make sure all users have access to the directory as apache runs under a non-privileged (or whatever you want to call it) user. I had to open up the privileges on my home directory in order for this to work.
```
  Include /Users/kkedrovsky/vhosts/*
```

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Edit /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and make sure the following line is uncommented.
```
  NameVirtualHost *:80
```

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For each site I create a new virtual host file under /Users/kkedrovsky/vhosts that looks like this (assuming the site is called “foobar”). You’ll need to adjust things like the email address and where you put the docroot of your site.

  <VirtualHost *:80>
      ServerAdmin karl@kedrovsky.com
      ServerName foobar
        
      DocumentRoot /Users/kkedrovsky/workspace/foobar/htdocs
    
      AddType text/html html
      AddHandler server-parsed .html
    
      <Directory />
          Options FollowSymLinks
          AllowOverride All
      </Directory>
      <Directory /Users/kkedrovsky/workspace/foobar/htdocs>
          Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews Includes
          AllowOverride All
          Order allow,deny
          allow from all
      </Directory>
    
      ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/foobar-error.log
    
      # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
      # alert, emerg.
      LogLevel warn
        
      CustomLog /var/log/apache2/foobar-access.log combined
      ServerSignature On
    
  </VirtualHost>

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Add the following to /etc/hosts
```
  127.0.0.1    foobar
```

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Restart apache.
```
  sudo apachectl restart
```

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That’s all there is to it. The two downsides (from my perspective) of doing this instead of using a VM are the lack of email server capabilities and the fact that I’m developing in OSX and deploying on Linux. I’m also a bit more confortable using Linux since I’ve used it for so long. There are definitely upsides to this approach though, the biggest being that it’s a LOT easier to set up.