The other M in LAMP

I’ve been playing with MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia. MediaWiki is in PHP and classic LAMP fodder so I had assumed that it was going to be something of a trial, given that I have no Linux box at home to test things on.

But of course my little ancient iMac is running OS X and while I’ve always been aware that it’s Unix based in a kind of abstract way, I’ve finally had a demonstration of what that means in practice.

The MySQL installer of OS X is laughably simple, really, it’s not even worth talking about.

Getting PHP to run on Panther is also simple if you know what you’re doing. Google (at least the searches I was running) talks about downloading this, and compiling that. In the end a little poking about revealed the following (repeated here for future googling):

All you have to do to make PHP work in panther is edit /etc/httpd/httpd.conf and uncomment the lines

LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so

and

AddModule mod_php4.c

I was stunned. No fuss, no muss.

sudo apachectl restart and you are away.

Deploy where you will, but for PHP development I think you’d be hard pressed to find something better than a MAMP setup.