Mac Mini and PHP
January 11th, 2005I read various live blogs during the Mac World event today. It was interesting to see servers melt and the strategies people used to cope. A busy day in the Apple universe.
I just want to point out that the Mac mini comes with Apache and PHP pre-installed.
If you want, compiling a new version of PHP on the Mac is pretty easy if you have ever compiled anything on unix. If you have trouble compiling PHP extensions on OS X its probably due to this bug, which has an easy work around. You can also download an OS X PHP binary.
Compiling MySQL is also easy, or you can download a binary. If your flavor is postgresSQL, then compile or download that, too.
Bare Bones just released a free version of TextWrangler. TextWrangler and its paid version, BBEdit, are superb text editors for PHP. The diff and grep (multi file) capabilities are very good. Open via FTP/SFTP is handy and it knows what to do with unix permissions. It does does syntax highlighting, is fast, and it stays out of the way.
The following shell command will cause TextWrangler to use php.net for the find in reference command:
defaults write com.barebones.textwrangler Services:ADCReferenceSearchTemplate "http://www.php.net/search.php?show=quickref&pattern=%@"
I understand you can also use PHP with Apple’s Dev Tools (XCode), but I don’t. XCode is free with OS X, but not installed by default.
OS X comes with CVS, too. Unfortunately, text wrangler doesn’t integrate with it as BBEdit and XCode do.
The Mac is a great PHP development platform.
I will end this evangelizing post with a pure marketing quote from the Apple site for the Mac mini:
Perfect for Programmers
Set a space-saving Mac mini atop your workstation PC and add a KVM switch to share keyboard, monitor and mouse. Mac OS X includes free developer tools for Mac, UNIX and Java. Test out a Mac version of your latest creation, instantly. Pretty soon you’ll be using the Mac full-time, with that PC relegated to the testbed.
All Posts
January 12th, 2005 at 7:37 am
Preach the word, brother. My home machine is a Cube, originally G3/450MHz, now upgraded to G4/1.4GHz, and I use BBEdit everywhere all the time. It is a fantastic web development platform. (The new Mini looks like a half-Cube on its side. I am covetous of it.
January 13th, 2005 at 11:11 am
perfect.. in that case, for a home server! already configured.
and it runs quiet.. which is the most important thing. oh, and it’s cheap, and good looking in the corner.
January 14th, 2005 at 12:56 am
you can use jedit under OSX, and its free, and many plugin avaliable.
February 14th, 2005 at 8:16 pm
Now they’re giving away Mac minis! Details are available on my blog.
May 30th, 2005 at 9:42 am
I’ve created a package for XCode which enables PHP syntax coloring and project creation. It can be downloaded at: http://www.mr-technical.com/public/?q=node/13
July 29th, 2005 at 12:13 am
Thanks for the php.net reference tip - it’s great. I love TextWrangler. Something similar for Windows (though not quite as powerful, and shareware, not free) is TextPad (http://www.textpad.com/) - I have used it happily for years. Like TW, it has very powerful regular-expression support, and other unique features like column-select, cut and paste.