Configuring Mac Snow Leopard for Symfony development

If you want to develop symfony applications using the built in Apache web server in Mac OS X here are my notes. Keep in mind, this is not a production configuration but just the necessary steps to get a developer workstation up and running.

1. Activate Web Sharing
   System Preferences -> Sharing -> Web Sharing
2. Change your UserDir settings. In a terminal window, edit the file with your userdir configuration.
   vim /etc/apache2/users/username.conf
   Remove or comment the contents. Paste the following information:
   UserDir Sites/web
   
   
   <Directory "/Users/username/Sites/web">
       Options Indexes MultiViews
       AllowOverride All AuthConfig
       Order allow,deny
       Allow from all
   </Directory>
   
   Alias /~username/sf /Users/username/Sites/lib/vendor/symfony/data/web/sf
   
   <Directory "/Users/username/Sites/lib/vendor/symfony/data/web/sf">
     AllowOverride All
     Allow from All
   </Directory>
3. Substitute the text username for you username.
4. Enable php (and mysql if you want). See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1293484/easiest-way-to-activate-php-and-mysql-on-mac-os-10-6-snow-leopard
5. Now you can either install
   
   • the sandbox
   • the svn version,
     
   • the tar.gz version
   • or you can check out your existing project from source control.
6. After you've installed symfony, edit the .htaccess file in the symfony web folder
   
   • Enable RewriteBase by uncommenting it
   • Change the RewriteBase directive  to RewriteBase /~username/
7. Restart apache
   sudo apachectl restart
   

BTW: I wrote a more detailed post back in 2008. It hasn't been updated since then, but there might still be a few useful hints there: http://techinorg.blogspot.com/2008/07/ubuntu-post-install-customization.html