Integrating MacPorts Apache 2 with System Preferences

Just returned from PyCon 2007, and wanted to try out a few of the new web frameworks tools I'd seen. To get started I needed to be running my own installation of Apache, instead of the system default installation. The latter does not AFAIK include sources, and that makes it difficult to add things like mod_fastcgi.

Install Apache 2

I used the MacPorts/DarwinPorts version of Apache 2:

$ sudo port install mod_fastcgi

Configure /etc/hostconfig

Following hints from elsewhere on the web, I tried to ensure Apache 2 would start at system boot by adding this line to /etc/hostconfig. (Haven't tested this yet.)

WEBSERVER=-NO-

APACHE2=-YES-

Fake Out System Preferences

To tell System Preferences Sharing->Personal Web Sharing to start Apache 2 rather than the system default Apache 1.3:

$ cd /usr/sbin
$ sudo mv apachectl apachectl-1.3
$ sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl apachectl
$ pushd /opt/local/apache2/conf 
$ sudo cp httpd.conf.sample httpd.conf
$ sudo vi httpd.conf
# Add this line somewhere near the DocumentRoot directive
PidFile "/private/var/run/httpd.pid"

Move Static Content and CGIs

I made sure System Preferences was able to start the new web server, and then double-checked that I actually was getting content from my new document root :) Then it was time to move static content from /Library/WebServer/DocumentRoot to /opt/local/apache2/htdocs, and cgi-bin executables from /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables to /opt/local/apache2/cgi-bin.

Copy CGI-Bin Configuration Directives

Finally I had to copy the configuration section for my Trac projects to /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf.

All done.

Update

Oops, not quite. I want the log files to be under /var/log/httpd, where Console.app expects to find them. So CustomLog and ErrorLog need to be fixed up in all of the *.config files under /opt/local/apache2/conf/.