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.