It's been an interesting evening. Back at my parents home tonight (will leave back to Evora tomorrow), I've been trying to get the information system framework to run in the new Mac Mini that currently lives in my bedroom. So this entry goes some way towards documenting this evening's trip.

Leopard ships with a fully functional Apache 2.2 copy and getting PHP5 to play along with it is a simple matter of uncommenting one line in httpd.conf. Installing PostgreSQL is a breeze using Marc Liyanage's PostgreSQL package, not forgetting to set the cluster creation encoding to Latin1. This is because everything in the information system is Latin1 and it saves a lot of headaches.

The trouble began when I noticed that Leopard didn't really ship with PostgreSQL bindings in its PHP5 installation. So basically there was no choice other than recompiling PHP from scratch. I tried Marc's PHP5 package which includes PostgreSQL support but alas it all went well until the installation process bombed out in the end with a cryptic error.

So, off to compiling PHP's source which had me searching for the Leopard DVDs so I could install XCode's tools, namely gcc. Once that was done, compiling PHP was a breeze. Problem was that once it got installed, Apache complained that the PHP module had the wrong architecture. One minute of Googling told me that Leopard's Apache comes pre-configured for all 4 archs and so I need to do that for whatever I install that interfaces with it. This is a prospect that clearly sucked.

Miraculously, someone came up with a much better and hassle free choice: stripping the httpd binary of the surplus architectures and leaving 32-bit only. Here's the magic sauce:

$ cd /usr/sbin
$ sudo cp httpd httpd-fat
$ sudo lipo httpd -thin i386 -output httpd

Works like a charm.

Et voila'. It's up and running!

Now I'm spent, I better crawl to bed.