Finding myself in need of a PostgreSQL server to test some patches for Drupal core, I've decided to do a follow up to my guide to getting PHP + GD + MySQL installed on OS X.

Fortunately for me John VanDyk wrote up Beginning with Drupal 6 and PostgreSQL on OS X 10.5 Leopard which covers the nitty gritty of getting PostgreSQL server installed. He doesn't address recompiling PHP so I'll pick up the story there.

Last Updated: June 1, 2009

Today I needed to get Drupal's ImageCache module to regenerate a bunch of resized images. ImageCache doesn't create the images until a browser requests them and at that point the new image is saved to the disk for future use.

One way to generate the images would have been to just click my way through every page on the site but I'm way to lazy for that. So I used wget:

By using the recursive (-r) and --delete-after switches I was able to have it crawl the site and get all the images generated. Bonus points for running in on the server so that the transfers were via the loopback interface so the transfer didn't count against the monthly bandwidth limit.

This guide walks through the steps necessary to setup PHP on Leopard in order to run the HEAD version of Drupal. The basic steps are installing several prerequisites then recompiling Apache and PHP from source. It could totally bork your system, I'm just writing it down so the next time I need to do this I can remember what I did. I wish I could give credit to all the places I stole bits from but I didn't do a good job of keeping notes early on.

Every time Apple releases a security update it seems to end up overwriting PHP or Apache and I end up revisiting these instructions. Since it's my personal guide I'm continually modifying it to match my current needs. For example, the last big change was adding in old mysql extension and the new PDO-mysql extension. The upside for you, kind reader, is that this keeps the instructions up-to-date. The down side is that when you come back in two months and try to repeat one part of this it may not work because I've changed some of the earlier steps.

Last Updated: August 26, 2009