Install PECL extensions with Homebrewed PHP on Mac OS X Mountain Lion

I needed to use the HTTPRequest class that comes as a PECL extension to PHP. This was easier than I thought. If you followed my instructions for installing PHP with Homebrew, then installing the PECL extensions should be even easier. Here's how:

Open up the Terminal and do:

$ pecl list-all

just as a sanity check to make sure you have PECL installed from your Homebrew installation of PHP. You will see a list of all available PECL packages, and, potentially after some "Warnings" from bugs in the PEAR code, you'll notice that "pecl/pecl_http" is in the list.

Before you can install anything with pecl, you need autoconf. It helps to build in the environment with which we're working. Just do:

$ brew install autoconf

Then install your favorite PECL extension (in my case, pecl_http):

$ pecl install pecl_http

Then a whole bunch of code garbage will fly past the screen. In a minute or two, some config options will appear. Press "return" to accept the defaults in brackets. When it's finished, you'll know.

If you got a fatal error during install, try running under sudo. If you still get an error, wait a day or two and maybe they'll push a bug fix?

Then just restart your web service (I just reboot my computer) and you're done!

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Running Inkscape in Mac OS X Mountain Lion (finding X11)

OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) doesn't come with X11 (an X.org window server) installed like previous versions do. But getting Inkscape to run is still very easy.

Download the latest XQuartz and install it.

Next time you run Inkscape, it will ask you, "Where is X11?" It probably won't be in that list, so browse for it in your "Applications" folder, then go inside "Utilities" and choose XQuartz.

Then give it maybe several minutes to run the first time. And there you have it!

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PHP output buffering on nginx

Simple trick: if you're trying to use output buffering with PHP on nginx, and it should be working, but the whole response still comes down all at once to the client, try disabling gzip compression:

nginx.conf

gzip off;

That should do it! Sure, your "fast" pages might become a little slower, but your slow pages will appear to be loading instead of hanging.

(This works because, of course, nginx can't compress the output until it's all ready to go first!)

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Install nginx / PHP / MySQL on Mac OS X Mountain Lion with Homebrew

Last time I wiped my Macbook Pro, I used Macports to install my web development environment. Doing it that way was really hard compared to using Homebrew. I now fully recommend Homebrew for all Mac package management needs. This is much easier than the Macports way. Trust me.

Here's how to install nginx, PHP, and MySQL using Homebrew on your Mac. It's actually quite easy. I did it on Mountain Lion (10.8) but it probably works for Lion too. I followed the tutorial here on EZUnix.org, but my version fixes some typos and explains some steps along the way.

Disclaimer: This is new to me; I'm not an expert. I didn't encounter any problems, and I did this from a clean install of OS X Mountain Lion. If you encounter any errors, I may or may not be able to help...



Estimated Time: 10-20 minutes



Got Command Line Developer Tools?


You're gonna need them. Finally, Apple provides the command line tools without needing to install the nearly-2GB-Xcode from the App Store. Go to their Developers Downloads page and download the latest "Command Line Tools" for your version of OS X, then install them.


Install Homebrew

In case you haven't already, install Homebrew by following the instructions at the bottom of this page.

Homebrew's most legit PHP "tap" (package source) is by Jose Gonzalez. Make sure to install it:

$ brew tap josegonzalez/homebrew-php

We also need a tap for a PHP 5.4 dependency, zlib:

$ brew tap homebrew/dupes

Install MySQL

$ brew install mysql

It'll chew on that for a few minutes, then we need to get it to run as our user account:

$ unset TMPDIR
$ mysql_install_db --verbose --user=`whoami` --basedir="$(brew --prefix mysql)" --datadir=/usr/local/var/mysql --tmpdir=/tmp

I got a "Warning" during this operation, and while I don't think it's critical, I did this and things have seemed to work fine... if you got a warning during the last step, then you could do this:

$ sudo mv /usr/local/opt/mysql/my-new.cnf /usr/local/opt/mysql/my.cnf

Then, to launch MySQL at startup:

$ cp `brew --prefix mysql`/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
$ launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist

Done! Next: the web server.


Install nginx

$ brew install nginx

Let that stew, then run these commands to have nginx run as root at startup (so we can listen on port 80, the default, instead of 8080 which is less convenient for development):

$ sudo cp `brew --prefix nginx`/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/
$ sudo sed -i -e 's/`whoami`/root/g' `brew --prefix nginx`/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist


(Okay, to be honest, this didn't work for me to load nginx right away on start; I had to edit the /Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist file and remove the two lines that specify the UserName key and value (one line specifies the key, the other the value). Then it worked.)

Then create a log file... this allows us to view server logs in the Mac Console, which is really convenient, but isn't required:

$ sudo mkdir /var/log/nginx/

(Don't forget to tell nginx to put the log file there in nginx.conf: error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;)

Done! Next up: PHP.


Install PHP

$ brew install --without-apache --with-fpm --with-mysql php54

Make sure to change "php54" to whatever version you want. At time of writing, PHP 5.4 is the latest stable, but PHP 5.5 is in alpha. I assume 5.5 would be php55, etc. Be sure to adjust any following commands with the proper version number.


Quick note: Yes, OS X does come with PHP pre-installed. But we don't want to use that. We need an install we can use with nginx and FastCGI Process Manager (fpm). Plus, we want the latest version, and I'm just not that into compiling from source.

To run php-fpm at startup:

$ sudo cp `brew --prefix php54`/homebrew-php.josegonzalez.php54.plist  /Library/LaunchAgents/
$ sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew-php.josegonzalez.php54.plist

Done! Next up: configuration.



Finishing up

I want all php commands to be using the latest version, not the default PHP binary. So I use this little trick to create a symlink from the default PHP binary to the new one... I do this for both php and php-fpm. If you're confused about which versions are where, use the "whereis" command, like: "whereis php".


$ php-fpm -v
$ sudo mv /usr/sbin/php-fpm /usr/sbin/php-fpm.bak
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/php54/5.4.11/sbin/php-fpm /usr/sbin/php-fpm
$ php-fpm -v

Notice that the version went from 5.3 to 5.4 (in my case). Now for the php binary:

$ php -v
$ sudo mv /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php.bak
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/php /usr/bin/php
$ php -v

I also added /usr/local/sbin to the PATH by adding that directory to the /etc/paths file, then restarting Terminal. You can see your current PATH by typing echo $PATH.

Important config files:

/usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
/usr/local/etc/php/5.4/php.ini
/usr/local/etc/nginx/fastcgi_params

You'll probably want to change these for your

The nice thing about Homebrew installations is that you generally don't need sudo to use or manage these services, since they're in /usr/local.

Alright. Well that did it for me. Enjoy your new dev environment!

You can stop nginx with nginx -s stop, and start it again with just nginx. You can also just reload the conf file with nginx -s reload.

I installed MySQL Workbench and was able to make a connection to the localhost MySQL server by adding a connection to host "localhost" with no password. The only thing I typed was that hostname and everything worked like a charm.

I did use my nginx.conf file from my previous install; you can view a sample conf file if you need it, in my other post about using Macports to do this (link at top of this post).

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PHP's PECL extension (for HttpRequest) worked on website but not command line (CLI)?

I'm running PHP on my Mac under nginx and FastCGI... and that's great and fine. I used Macports to set that all up.

Well, Macs have PHP in another, default location: /usr/bin/php, not Macport's /opt/local/bin/php. When I installed the PECL extensions using Macports (after installing PHP), it installed them to the PHP at /opt/local/bin/php, not /usr/bin/php.

I have a PHP script that makes HTTP requests, and it may be a long process, so I spin up PHP on the command-line to do it in the background. Took me forever to figure out that that PHP binary was different from the one used by nginx when I loaded up my dev site.

The CLI version of PHP which I was running for this didn't have PECL installed. A quick, dirty way to fix this:

1. sudo mv /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php.bak
2. sudo ls -s /opt/local/bin/php /usr/bin/php

That's right! Make php a symlink! Why? Well, I'm not sure. I tried simply doing the "mv" to kind of "hide" the binary from sh, but it was giving me "php - command not found" errors, even though /opt/local/bin is was in the PATH. Why didn't it look there? I have no idea. I'm not very proficient with unix stuff. But the symlink was enough to trick it and it's working great now.

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How to remove a word from the dictionary (Chrome, Mac OS X)

This trick works for any program on the Mac which uses the default dictionary (the same one that TextEdit, Mail, and the other built-in programs use). So when I accidentally added a misspelled word to the dictionary in Google Chrome, I wanted to remove it. Here's how:

1. Open TextEdit
2. Type the misspelled word
3. Right-click it and click "Unlearn Spelling"

Done! Works across-the-board on Mac OS 10.5 (I'm pretty sure), and higher -- I am running Mountain Lion.

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External hard drive backups while you sleep

On most modern computers, there's an energy saver preference which will shut down your hard disks when the computer is idle or in "sleep mode." On a Mac, this is enabled by default in System Preferences --> Energy Saver.

I had been puzzled as to why CrashPlan, in my case, wasn't backing up remotely overnight... it did a grand total of about 20 files... If you want to enable your backups to run while you sleep, make sure your hard drives don't sleep.

Untick the checkbox in the Energy Saver window that says "Put hard disks to sleep when possible," and your backups should now continue to run as long as your Mac is alive and waking.

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