MacOS – OS X Lion – How to configure website on Apache

When accessing websites on your "localhost", there are several permissions which are required. The localhost content may be in your Sites directory, in which case, these commands may help prevent any "Forbidden" messages.

Ensure the Users directory allows read directory access:

cd /
sudo chmod -v 755 Users

Ensure the username directory allows read directory access:

cd Users
sudo chmod -v 755 username

Ensure your Sites directory allows read directory access:

cd ~
chmod -v 755 Sites

Every subdirectory of Sites needs read access:

cd ~/Sites
find ~/Sites -type d -print -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Every file in Sites and subdirectories needs read access:

cd ~/Sites
fing ~/Sites -type f -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Apache uses the _www group so, to give Apache full access to everything in the Sites directory, set the extended attributes with this:

chmod -R +a "group:_www allow list,add_file,search,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,file_inherit,directory_inherit" ~/Sites

1. How do you configure your vhosts?

The "Lion way" to do so would be uncommenting the following line in your httpd.conf.

#Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Now you can edit /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and put your vhosts in there. It's a good idea to start with a default one that will match all unqualified hosts, for example:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot /Library/WebServer/Documents
</VirtualHost>

Next, you can either add every vhost to the same file, or you can set up a similar system like Debian by including all files in a specific directory next, like so:

Include /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/*

Now whether you symlink files here that exist somewhere else (sites-available) or put actual files doesn't really matter. Personally, I think sites-available is overkill for a dev box (and I don't ever really want to "disable" a vhost), so I just create a file for every vhost directly in sites-enabled or equivalent (in fact I named the directory /etc/apache/sites to avoid confusion).

2. Where do you put the code and docroot for your vhosts?

My actual sites I put in /Users/username/Sites. I prefer to put them under my home directory for easier access in Finder etc. That said, it is good to notice that this directory is exposed by default by the userdir module. Since I don't need userdir hosting, and I am going to configure webroots below, I disabled it by commenting the following line:

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf

3. Where do you put the log files?

Log files I keep the same (eg. /var/log/apache/*). Again, for a local development box, I believe individual log files for every vhost are overkill. There's only so much that I can multitask :) If you do want separate log files, you can of course configure it that way inside the VirtualHost directive (for example /var/log/apache/my.project.dev-error.log).

4. Where do you put the local application configuration?

Which applications are you referring to? If web application, I keep those together with all other project files. Depending on your architecture, your config files do not need to be under your webroot if that's an issue, in fact typically my webroot for any given project will be /Users/username/Sites/someproject/web, so config files could be at /Users/username/Sites/someproject/config without exposing them through Apache.

5. How do you resolve the name service?

The most straight-forward would be adding each hostname to /etc/hosts. Unfortunately, this doesn't do wildcards. If you feel comfortable with setting up a DNS server like bind, you could configure one locally or on your network to resolve *.dev to 127.0.0.1, for example. Disadvantage of doing that on your network is of course that it will stop working at a different location. Personally, I use /etc/hosts.