Installing CakePHP on MacOS X

This is how I setup CakePHP on my MacBook with PHP5 and MySQL5. I have MacOS X 10.4.8 installed.

Here's a quick howto to get CakePHP installed on MacOS X. Your goal is to install PHP, a database, CakePHP, and have it load at http://localhost through a browser in your local workstation environment.

Note:

This was tested on MacOS 10.4.8. This document assumes you know how to open a terminal, decompress tarballs, edit files, and navigate a shell. Apache 1.x is already installed in a default MacOSX install, so you don't need to worry about installing it.

Download and install PHP 5 for MacOS X. There's a nice package here. Follow their instructions.
http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/php/
If you're using MySQL 5, download the MySQL DMG package from MySQL.

Version 4 => http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/4.0.html
Version 5 => http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html
Then follow their instructions to install and set the database root user password.

http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/mysql/
Download the latest CakePHP.

http://cakephp.org/downloads
Follow the reference install document here. There are some specific MacOS X setup that is covered below:

http://manual.cakephp.org/chapter/installing
Open a terminal. Applications>Utilities>Terminal.

Decompress Cake into your webroot on MacOSX. That's located here:
/Library/WebServer/Documents

In my case, I decompressed Cake into my home folder under ~/Sites so that I can also do local development under my username: http://localhost/~username/cake And then I created a symbolic link under /Library/WebServer/Documents to point to /Users/username/Sites/cake

In /Library/WebServer/Documents type:
ln -s /Users/username/Sites/cake cakeThen edit your httpd.conf file. That's located here.

/etc/httpd/httpd.conf

Edit the file and change the document root line from:
DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"to
#DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents/cake/app/webroot" We remarked the old setting and switched the docroot to the cake webroot folder. Don't worry. http://localhost/~username will still work. But http://localhost/ will always point to cake in your local environment.

Then find the block:
<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents"> Find & edit:
AllowOverride None to
AllowOverride All This will allow mod_rewrite to work. Save the edits.

Back in the GUI, we need to restart Apache to use our new settings.
Apple Menu>System Preferences>Sharing>Services>Personal Web Sharing

Stop the service and start it again. Make sure you have the Firewall off or allow the Personal Web Sharing service so that it's accessible through a browser.

You can also restart the server at the command line:
sudo su
apachectl restart Next you need to add a user in your database that cake will access and then add the access info in the database file (app/config/database.php). That's covered in the cake install document.

Open a browser and load your cake site:
http://localhost or
http://127.0.0.1 If all goes well, you should see the cake default page and it should be able to connect to your database. If not, check the logs and try to diagnose the problem:

Applications>Utilities>Console>Logs>/var/log>httpd>error_log

If you would like a virtual hosting setup like http://appname.localhost/, add the following to apache:
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName appname.localhost
    DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents/appname/webroot"

    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/appname_error.log
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/appname_access.log combined
</VirtualHost> Then add appname.localhost to your hosts file:

/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1    appname.localhost   localhost That's it!