Setting up a local website with server-side scripts on Mac OS X

Alec Jacobson

May 13, 2012

weblog/

Try to go to http://localhost/. If you don't find anything there then turn on System Preferences > Sharing > Web Sharing. On my 10.7 machine the default site location is at /Library/WebServer/Documents/index.html.en You should be able to edit this file and see that http://localhost/ changes. Now, we'd like to have an arbitrary folder contain our website, so I'll use ~/Documents/IGL-website. Copy your websites source or put some source in this folder. Now we setup the redirect necessary to send some local domain name (we'll use localigl to our website at ~/Documents/IGL-website. Open up the file /private/etc/hosts and add the line:

127.0.0.1       localigl

Now you should see that going to http://localigl/ also directs to /Library/WebServer/Documents/index.html.en Now edit the file /private/etc/apache2/users/YOURUSERNAME.conf and add the following:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<Directory "/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Sites/">
    Options Indexes MultiViews Includes
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName localhost
    DocumentRoot /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Sites/
</VirtualHost>

<Directory "/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Documents/IGL-website/">
    Options Indexes MultiViews Includes
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName localigl
    DocumentRoot /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Documents/IGL-website/
</VirtualHost>

You'll need to add executable permissions to the path preceding your website, so for my example this means:

chmod +x ~/Documents

To get php scripts working correctly, in /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf uncomment the following line to look like this:

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Now, you must restart your apache server. The easiest way is to toggle System Preferences > Sharing > Web Sharing. With all this, you should now be able to go to http://localigl/ and see your (possibly php-based) webpage.