Arjan van der Gaag .nl

I’m Arjan van der Gaag and this is my website about me, code, food, photography and more. If you like, we can get in touch.

Snow Leopard web development configuration

After installing Snow Leopard on my iMac I found I had to tweak some settings before I could continue my daily web development workflow. First, you should note Snow Leopard now comes with PHP 5.3 and it will overwrite your custom Apache configuration.

Here’s what I did to get up and running:

  1. Moved /etc/php.ini.default to /etc/php.ini.
  2. Edited php.ini (using search/replace) so that display_errors = On and mysql.default_port = /tmp/mysql.sock.
  3. I also set a default timezone (search php.ini for ‘timezone’) to suppress warnings about server timezone being unreliable.
  4. Restored my vhosts.conf file from a back-up to bring back my various *.dev virtual hosts.
  5. I replaced all my PHP short tags with their longer equivalents (<?= to <?php echo) as these are deprecated in PHP 5.3.

After these rather simple steps I was back up and running, although they took a a little time and googling. Overall, I was surprised how little installing Snow Leopard messed up my system.