TheNitai

Today I set out to get MySQL and PHP setup on my MacBook Pro. Since Apache2 already comes with MacOS X (mine is Snow Leopard and yours should be too!). Now, the funny thing is that I first searched on the web how to best install PHP and MySQL.

Surely, I came across MAMP (a package that gets you Apache2, PHP, MySQL and a couple libraries) in a nice one click application and some others. Being the guy who rather has things separated and controllable, I quickly shined away from those. Thought, I gave MAMP a try, but could not get MySQL to listen to anything else then the internal Apache2 server from the MAMP package (but guess that is another story and I’m really not doing this the first time.). Anyhow…

I then looked into getting Apache2, MySQL and PHP with MacPorts. Thought MacPorts has proven to be perfect in such circumstances, I had a hard time (and it took very long) to get this setup up and running. I’m sure, some of you have had successful installs and all works great, but at the end it did not work for me. There are even more instructions to get PHP running, with a lot of tweaking and such, but to be honest in the end…

Really the simplest and most straightforward method to get Apache2, MySQL and PHP running on MacOS X is;

MySQL

Now, this is really no brainer. All you need to do is to go to http://www.mysql.com and download the recent release. Within the download image you will find a nice installer and Preference pane which lets you start/stop MySQL. If you want to go all GUI, then also download the GUI tools from MySQL.

Apache2/PHP

The probably easiest of it all. Since MacOS X already comes with Apache2 and PHP all you need to do is to enable it. Thought, PHP is disabled in the httpd.conf, all there is to do is to edit httpd.conf and uncomment the mod for the php library.

That’s it!

Nothing to install, (almost) nothing to configure. Simple and easy.

Like many others I installed Snow Leopard on my Mac and like many I’m most of the time very happy with it. But there are some things that still don’t work as expected. Especially troublesome is when working Hardware can not be used anymore.

Unfortunately, I had one of those experiences today. As a owner of the Late 2008 MacBook Pro series, I don’t have a Smart Card Reader built in, thus I bought myself a Griffin eSata Express Card, which I use to read/write to Smart Cards. But as I found out today, after wanting to use it for the first time since upgrading to Snow Leopard, the Smart Card could not be read. As a fact, the Card Reader is not even recognized by the System itself.

Apparently, Apple disables some drivers during the installation as stated in the Technote called “About incompatible Software”. One of those drivers is the one from Sillicon Image which enables the Smart Card Reader. After some searching I found the same driver again over at the Sillicon Image download page and installed the latest driver (from 2007) again. Low and behold the card works again.

Not sure, how long this will work, but for now this will hopefully help anybody else.

Update:
After some more searching I found that updated Snow Leopard ExpressCard drivers are available from FirmTek. So far, I can report successful installation working with this driver as well.