Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

If you’re developing web content, you probably want your local server setup to mirror your
remote setup as closely as possible. Since ~username sites went out of fashion with Geocities, you
probably want to use the document root.
If you’re the only user on your computer, that’s certainly an option. However, writing personal
project files to a directory with administrative privileges is potentially problematic, and
/Library/WebServer/Documents is not exactly a convenient location to have to remember.
There are a couple of options. The easiest method, which I recommend, is to simply create a
symbolic link that points the expected document root to your local Sites directory.
NOTE Symbolic links and shortcuts are similar in concept but very different in practice. Links
are a UNIX file system construct, while shortcuts belong to the Finder. Using a shortcut to redirect
your document root will not work.
To redirect your document root using symbolic links, navigate to the /Library/WebServer
directory. Move aside the original Documents folder. You could delete it, but simply renaming it to
something like OldDocuments will do the trick.
Launch the Terminal application from /Applications/Utilities, or, if you’re a true power
user, from the Dock. Invoke the following command:
sudo ln -s ~/Sites /Library/WebServer/Documents
This means, using superuser privileges (sudo), create a link (ln) that is symbolic (-s) from my
local Sites directory (~/Sites) at the path /Library/WebServer/Documents.
Since you’re using sudo, this will prompt you for your password. After entering it, invoking
ls on /Library/WebServer will show a file called Documents. In the Finder, it will appear to be a
shortcut. Loading the root site in your browser of choice should show your personal home site.
TIP Your browser may have the old page cached, so you might need to reload or even empty
your cache to see the change.
Configuring Apache
CHAPTER 22 LEOPARD AS A WEB SERVER 387
Since Apache is a UNIX application, it doesn’t have a convenient GUI preference pane, nor does
it use a standard Macintosh property list. Rather, it has its own configuration file in its own
directory using its own peculiar scheme.
Fortunately, the configuration file, like everything else about Apache, is well documented
and, honestly, not that complicated. The default home pages all contain links to the Apache manual,
as does the dire warning that begins the configuration file itself. You can always just go
straight to Apache’s documentation home page: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/.
NOTE The name of the Apache HTTP server has an interesting history. Originally, httpd was
the NCSA HTTP Server, a project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
When its creator, Robert McCool, left NCSA, the project stalled. A group of developers continued
working on patches for the NCSA code base, creating “a patchy” HTTP server in its
stead.
Apache’s configuration files live in the directory /private/etc/apache2. Unless you’ve turned
on the ability to see invisible files in the Finder, you’ll have to navigate there in Terminal. Listing
the contents of the directory shows the file we’ve come here to see: httpd.conf.
NOTE Although it’s called Apache, the name of the UNIX executable is httpd, which reflects
its role as a background process (daemon) that serves the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.