Sam Pierson's Blog » apache

Apache server redirects using MacOS Server Admin

sam — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:16:09 +0000

Note to self before I delete this entry.
This will redirect an entire site:

Server Admin -> Your server -> Web -> Your site -> Aliases -> Url Aliases and Redirects

Type = RedirectMatch
Pattern = .*
Path = http://example.com

ServerAdmin wipes changes to apache2/site/* files

sam — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:49:37 +0000

If you change the configuration for any site using the Mac OS X Server Admin tool, it will rewrite every single site file in the /etc/apache2/site/ folder. Do not change these by hand if you use this tool.

This is somewhat braindead as for example to use pretty permalinks in Wordpress you need AllowOverride FileInfo for that . However the only choice that Server Admin gives you is AllowOverride All.

Getting PHP working in Apache2 on Mac OS X Leopard

sam — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:42:38 +0000

As with OS X Leopard Server, the OS X Leopard standard OS is missing Apache config statements to enable PHP support. Of course with standard Leopard, you don’t get the fancy Server Admin tool to let us fix it via a GUI, so we do it by hand:

In /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:

Uncomment the php LoadModule statement:

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Then within the section, add:

AddType application/x-httpd-php php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source phps
AddType application/x-httpd-php3 php3
AddHandler php5-script php

Start or restart apache via the check box System Preferences -> Sharing -> Web Sharing

Installing mod_rails in Apache2

sam — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:00:00 +0000

Phusion Passenger, a.k.a. mod_rails, is a Ruby on Rails server integrated tightly with apache. Here is what I did to get it working on Mac OS X.

Make sure you have gcc – on my Mac OS X system, the easiest way to get this is to install XCode tools.

sudo gem install passenger

Per the install instructions for Passenger, edit httpd.conf and add the following. For neatness’ sake, I added the IfModule statements:

LoadModule passenger_module /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.3/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
# Adding declarations for mod_rails (a.k.a. Passenger).

        PassengerRoot /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.3
        PassengerRuby /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby

Then to get mod_rails to notice your rails application, inside the VirtualServer statement for your site, if you want the whole site to be served by Rails, just point the DocumentRoot at the ‘public’ folder of your Rails application. If you want your Rails application to be at a sub-URI of the main site, symlink that sub-URI to your Rails application (which can be completely outside the site content folders), then add the following for that URI (e.g. /blog):

RailsBaseURI /blog

Getting PHP working in Apache2 on Mac OS X Server

sam — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:00:00 +0000

In OS X Leopard, out of the box (at least on the System I got access to) Apache2 is missing an AddHandler statement for PHP, so PHP won’t work if you just enable the module. Here is how to fix that through Server Admin:

Check -> Web -> Settings -> Modules, php5_module is enabled.

In Settings -> MIME Types, check the following is present:

application/x-httpd-php      php

In Settings -> MIME Types -> Content Handlers, add the following:

php5-script      php

The resulting PHP entries in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf should look like this:

$ grep php httpd.conf
LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
AddHandler php5-script php
AddType application/x-httpd-php php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source phps
AddType application/x-httpd-php3 php3

Apache “can’t reliably establish hostname”

sam — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:13:00 +0000

To shut up apache when it’s complaining about “cant reliably establish hostname”, the response from /bin/hostname must match the first entry on the 127.0.0.1 line in /etc/hosts.