Setting Up Mac OS X Leopard for Web Development (in just two steps)

Some time ago I wrote how to set up Mac OS X Tiger for Web development. Since the entry has been a good starting point for myself, I decided to re-write it for Leopard.

One step forward, two steps back

The OS X cat has evolved hugely from developers point of view. Things like Apache 2, PHP 5, Python 2.5, easy_install, Subversion and Capistrano work out of the box. So we’re almost there, right? Wrong.

Unfortunately some aspects of the operating system are as bad as before, so in lack of working package management almost everything on top of the default setup means manual compling. And like that wouldn’t be bad enough, Leopards ingenious mixture of 64 bit and 32 bit binaries makes getting diferent programs and libraries work together unbelievably hard and complicated.

Installing MySQL from source is easy. Installing mod_python is a bit more complicated, but still possible. Trying to get Apache, mod_python and MySQL work together without segfaulting is nearly impossible — but still doable. And after that there is more PITA everywhere. Compiling things and trying to fix several dependencies by hand is just plain stupid. It’s so last decade that even a Mac-using developer shouldn’t need to do it.

And, luckily, you don’t have to!

Installing the perfect development environment

So after testing various diferent setups on my new iMac, here is the “there is no step three” formula for setting up a decent development environment for your Leopard:

1. Buy VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop (They’re both great, just choose which one you like best.)
2. Install Ubuntu on it.
3. There is no step three!

Now you can mount your real Linux box disk to the crappy Finder and use it like it was the real thing. This way you make both Mark Pilgrim and yourself happy!

PS. Happy New Year!
PPS. Yes, I still love my Mac :) But I hate it when it tries to make me do stuff that I really don’t want to. Like installing and configuring stuff from source. Ewww.