Craig Strong

I recently took the plunge a level further into the Mac world and purchased an iMac running Leopard. Although I have been running a Macbook for years, I decided that my main machine which I develop on was going to be something I have to spend less time configuring than my previous Linux machines (Although my servers will remain Linux). My main goal was to get a slick dev environment running PHP, MySQL and Apache.

Being naïve, I expected Leopard to provide me with a suitable stable release of these technologies straight out of the box, after all Leopard comes with Apache, MySQL and PHP right? Well this maybe true, but this is not exactly what I expected. Soon after building my little world of development I realised that the distribution was insufficient. Disappointingly I learnt that the PHP distribution was missing ‘pdo_mysql’! How could they have missed this I asked myself? The extent of use of ‘pdo_mysql’ usage should have made this a fundamental module, even Zend Framework, one of the worlds largest PHP Frameworks uses this as a standard. Anyway this is the crossroads, do I recompile the distributed version and risk the Apple support or do I download and compile my own version. Well I thought, lets install it via macports, that will save me a bit of hassle. This also meant that I could maintain a separate series of installs to what came with leopard.

After downloading and installing macports I installed the following:

sudo port install php5 +apache2 +mysql5 +pear

port install jpeg

port install libpng

port install freetypeport

port install libmcrypt

After updating my apache configuration located ‘/opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf/’ to suit my needs including pointing the my sites directory located in ‘Users/craigstrong/Sites’ I thought I’d give it a whirl on my web apps.

sudo apachectl restart

Everything seemed to work fine. I loaded up a few static pages from one of my Zend Framework projects, then I thought I’d try my login script. Boom! Guess what, no ‘pdo_mysql’ module installed. Arrggghhh!

Well off I went to get PHP 5.2.9 as this was the most stable recent release at the time. I convinced myself this is the solution I should had tried first. I downloaded this version and strapped myself in for a bit of compiling.

Within my extracted directory ~craigstrong/Programs/PHP-5.2.9 :

./configure
\
–prefix=/Users/craigstrong/Programs/php-5.2.9/
\
–with-apxs2=/opt/local/apache2/bin/apxs
\
–with-xsl=/usr’ \
–enable-mbstring
\
–with-gd’ \
–with-jpeg-dir=/opt/local 
\
–with-png-dir=/opt/local
\
–with-zlib-dir
\
–with-curl=/usr \
–enable-sockets \
–enable-exif
\
–with-mcrypt=/opt/local
\
–enable-soap
–with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
–with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config
\
–with-mysql-sock=/tmp/mysql.sock
\
–with-freetype-dir=/opt/local
\
–with-openssl=/opt/local \
–enable-cli

The configuration went well, so I thought lets start compiling and run the following:

make

Followed by :

sudo make install
sudo mv /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php.distro
sudo ln -s /Users/craigstrong/Programs/php-5.2.9/bin/php /usr/bin/php

All seemed to go well, and I went through my application again. This time when I go to the login form I was greeted with a new problem saying that the application could not find the function iconv(). Absolutely great I thought, another obstacle! After a bit of reading around this problem I found this link confirming my problem was real and what actually was attributed to a problem in the configure script on Leopard (http://www.mail-archive.com/php-bugs@lists.php.net/msg120323.html). I made sure to add the following 2 lines to the configure script pointing at my macports location.

–with-iconv=/opt/local
–with-openssl=/opt/local


As soon as I got to the ‘make’ command I was greeted with the following output:

Undefined symbols:
\\”_iconv_close\\”, referenced from:
_php_iconv_string in iconv.o
__php_iconv_strlen in iconv.o
__php_iconv_strpos in iconv.o
__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o
__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o
__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_substr in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_substr in iconv.o
_php_iconv_stream_filter_dtor in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_mime_encode in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_mime_encode in iconv.o
\\”_iconv_open\\”, referenced from:
_php_iconv_string in iconv.o
__php_iconv_strlen in iconv.o
__php_iconv_strpos in iconv.o
__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o
__php_iconv_mime_decode in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_substr in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_substr in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_mime_encode in iconv.o
_zif_iconv_mime_encode in iconv.o
_php_iconv_stream_filter_factory_create in iconv.o
ld: symbol(s) not found
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [sapi/cli/php] Error 1

Well at this point I was getting more annoyed and again started cursing Apple for not sorting this out with the distribution of Leopard. Have to blame some one I thought.

Anyway after a long think a good time reading around the web I convinced myself to download php5.3 and go through the process again. I went through the same process of downloading, configuring and compiling it using exactly the same configuration script as above. I wasn’t expecting a high chance of success with the previous events. However to my amazement it worked. I went through my site and I finally achieved my goal of having PHP with ‘pdo_mysql’ and ‘iconv’ support! Although frustrating following the process, it was satisfying getting a result.

As I use Zend_Framework the only thing that needed to be resolved is that my date() function was throwing an error saying something on the lines of ‘best not trust the systems timezone’. I then added the following function to the bootstrap date_default_timezone_set(‘GTM’) and my problem was solved. I now have a development environment I can enjoy.

Useful Links Relating to this post :

1. http://seancoates.com/php-5-2-5-on-leopard
2. http://www.mail-archive.com/php-bugs@lists.php.net/msg120323.html
3. http://drewish.com/node/110
4. http://www.malisphoto.com/tips/php-on-os-x.html