I’ll be doing some work with WordPress on another musician’s website. WordPress is an open source content management system. The blog you are reading is powered by WordPress.

Typically, a WordPress blog is driven by a LAMP server: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Because I run a Mac, I can host a WordPress environment on my local machine. I can use a Mac as if it were a LAMP server.

Apache is enabled by simply turning on Web Sharing under the Sharing option of System Preferences. Or, if you are a diehard Unix geek, you can bring up the Terminal app and enter:

sudo apachectl start

Make sure you have your root password handy.

PHP is installed in Mac OS X by default, but not enabled. To enable it, the Apache 2 configuration file, which is located at /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, has to be edited. There is a line which loads the PHP 5 module, which looks like this:

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Remove the comment symbol, #, and save the file. And restart Apache.

sudo apachectl restart

I had to download MySQL and install it myself. Not the most user friendly database install. And, even though I had the database up and running, my local install of WordPress would not connect to the database. It turns out that I had to edit a line in the wp-config.php file to replace localhost with a default IP address:

define(‘DB_HOST’,’127.0.0.1′);

After a few hours of Unix hacking, I had a full WordPress development machine on my Mac. Just like using a LAMP server on my ISP. For whatever reason, it felt good to still be able to hack around Unix, Apache, MySQL, PHP and WordPress.

I am a hopeless geek.