Setting up a Drupal development environment on a Mac

I am back at work full-time this summer at ImageX Media, where I have been over the past two summers as well. It’s a Mac shop. I don’t use Macs. And since I always seem to forget the process of setting up an ideal development environment on a Mac, I have recorded it here.

1. Install the wonderful MAMP (the free version works just fine) in your /Applications directory.

2. If you want to have your local web server on port 80 instead of the default 8888, there is a small extra step. Open up the /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf configuration file with your favourite editor (yes, I said favourite and not favorite). Look for a line that says Listen 8888 (for me it is on line 219) and change the port to 80.

3. Now you can go ahead and start up the server. If you didn’t change the port, feel free to use the Dashboard widget included in the MAMP directory (just double-click on it to install). If not, open up a terminal, change directories to /Applications/MAMP/bin and run sudo ./startApache.sh and sudo ./startMysql.sh.

4. If you’re like me and use the command line a lot, you’ll want to create a symlink to the MySQL binary so that you don’t have to type in the full path every time you want to use it. Run these commands: sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysql /usr/local/bin/mysql and sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqldump /usr/local/bin/mysqldump.

5. I found that the easiest way to develop multiple sites is to keep each one in a separate directory, and access each directory with a separate hostname. Add this line to the bottom of your /etc/httpd.conf file: VirtualDocumentRoot /Users/yourname/Sites/%0/.

6. Create directories in your vhosts location. For example, if I have three Drupal sites (site1, site2, site3) I would mkdir ~/Sites/site{1,2,3}.

7. For each directory you create in your Sites directory, make sure the hostname is pointing to localhost. Edit your /etc/hosts file to read: 127.0.0.1 localhost site1 site2 site3.

8. Drupal uses a lot of memory. Especially with imagecache. Open up your php.ini file (/Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/php.ini) and fine the line that reads memory_limit 8M (for me line 232) and change the 8M to 96M to ensure you never receive any out-of-memory errors.

9. One last tweak. Unzip your Drupal site in ~/Sites/site1. For pretty URLs to work you are going to need to make one little tweak. Open up the .htaccess file, and uncomment the line that reads RewriteBase / (line 103) if Drupal is found in your site’s root directory, or change the path appropriately.

And you’re done! Now you can access your sites by going to http://sites1/, which points to localhost, gets accepted by Apache, which looks up /Users/yourname/Sites/sites1, finds that it exists, and runs the index.php file. Capiche? Virtual hosts are powerful indeed. Final details:

• By default, the MySQL username and password are both root.
• To add a new site, create the directory, and add a corresponding entry in the /etc/hosts file. Simple.

Now it’s back to development for me.