Micropache: Cut the crap out of getting Apache running on your Mac
I recently—finally—upgraded my Mac from OS X 10.7 Lion to 10.10 Yosemite. Over the years, I’d become resigned to the fact that Apache is a pain in the ass to get running after any OS X upgrade.
I develop on Apache/PHP sites so infrequently that it really doesn’t make sense for me to go rummaging around system config files and setting up Virtual Hosts for each site. Nor am I really comfortable running MAMP, which requires me to fumble with buttons and checkboxes every time I want to start work.
Since I’m already in a terminal window—editing files with TextMate and managing source code with git—it makes sense to run an Apache server the same way.
In any other language or framework (eg: Python, Ruby, Django, Jeykll…) starting a development server in the current directory is as easy as running a single command. In Python, for example, it’s:
cd ~/projects/some-website.org/
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
In Jekyll it’s:
cd ~/projects/some-website.org/
jekyll serve
In Rails it’s… you get the idea.
So it hit me, why spend hours (days?) hacking my Mac to run Apache virtual hosts, when I could instead just fire up an Apache daemon in the current directory, serve the files, and be done with it? One command. Simples.
Turns out it really is that simple
The apachectl command doesn’t let you run a new server from a given directory, but the lower-level httpd command does. Its arguments are pretty gnarly, and it needs to be provided with a config file (this is Apache after all!). So I wrote something that wraps it all up into a single command: Micropache.
Now when I come to work on a WordPress site, for example, I cd into the project directory and run micropache.
It asks for my root password (getting Apache to run on a Mac without root privileges was a challenge I didn’t have time to face) and then starts serving the files at http://localhost on port 80.
cd ~/projects/some-website.org/
micropache
Password:
[Mon May 11 08:52:53 2015] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 39321] AH00163: Apache…
[Mon May 11 08:52:53 2015] [core:notice] [pid 39321] AH00094: Command line:…
Each HTTP request is logged to the console, and when I’m done, ctrl-C will quit the server, as you’d expect.
The whole script took me about an hour to write – but it’ll only take you ten seconds to install: github.com/zarino/micropache.
Combined with brew install homebrew/php/php56 and brew install mysql, you can basically outsource all the customary headaches of getting a local MAMP server running on a new Mac, without ever leaving your terminal.
