How to running Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin

How to running Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin for beginners (like me) who are still using Sierra.

Apache Activation

Since apache and php are already pre-installed on macOS Sierra, we will activate them by using our Terminal. First type in the following:

sudo apachectl start

(For those who don’t know how to open terminal, you can open it by pressing cmd+Space and typing ‘Terminal’ in spotlight or by going to /Applications/Utilities folder)

To ensure that apache works correctly, you can type in your web browser ‘localhost’ (without quotation marks) and you should see an html file that says

It works!

If everything is ok, then go to Finder and at the top bar you should see ‘Go’ section. There, click on ‘Go to Folder…’ and type the following:

/Library/WebServer/Documents

In this folder, you will find all the files that are hosted by your web server. When you create or copy paste some kind of files here, you can access them by typing localhost/… on your web browser. Also, the index.html file is the file that you saw when you typed localhost on your web browser.

PHP Activation

As we activated apache, now we can go further and activate PHP. Again you should open terminal and type the following and then type in your password:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

You can press Control+W to skip to the line that you are looking for.

This time we will encounter a page that is unlike our standard terminal page but more similar to a text editor. Here, we will uncomment the line which is related with the PHP by removing the ‘#’ at the beginning of it. You can press Control+W to skip to the line we are looking for (similar to cmd+f generally) and type

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

then press Enter. It should take you to the line that we would like to uncomment and activate. Or you can manually scroll down until you find the line that is written above. When you find that line, you should delete the “#” at the beginning and after that press Control+X to exit and you will be asked to save changes. Press Y, then press Enter and you will return back to terminal again.

By doing this, we activated our PHP that is pre-installed on MacOS Sierra. Let’s restart our web server by typing on terminal:

sudo apachectl restart

Now we want to change the default file which is displayed by our localhost. On your terminal, type again the following

sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Search for the code segment by manually scrolling down or pressing Control+X and then typing

DirectoryIndex index.html

You should see the following:

<IfModule dir_module>

DirectoryIndex index.html

</IfModule>

This is the default file that is displayed by our web server when we typed ‘localhost’ in the previous section. Now, we want our web server to run the file ‘index.php’. Therefore we will change the line:

DirectoryIndex index.html

to

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

This means that ‘index.php’ file will be displayed when we type in ‘localhost’ on our web browser. Go back to terminal by pressing Control+X, then press Y and then press Enter.

Let’s restart our web server by typing on Terminal the following line in order our changes to take effect:

sudo apachectl restart

In the following section, you can encounter a problem about user restrictions. To nip it in the bud, in your finder, go to /Library/WebServer and right click on the ‘Documents’ folder and choose ‘Get Info’. At the bottom of the pop-up window, you will see a section ‘Sharing & Permissions’. Expand it and you will see a small lock symbol at the bottom right corner. Click on it and enter your password. Now you can change the privileges. Change every privilege from ‘Read only’ to ‘Read & Write’.

Everything looks perfect thus far except one last thing: We don’t have ‘index.php’ file. Lets create it by using any type of text editor. In text editor, type in the following:

<?php

echo “<title>Welcome to index.php file</title>”;

echo “<p>Hello! This is index.php file</p>”;

?>

Save it as ‘index.php’ in /Library/WebServer/Documents folder.

To ensure that it works correctly, type in ‘localhost’ in your web browser (don’t forget to delete cookies) and you should see something like this:

index.php file

If you can see a page like this, we can go further to install MySQL.

Installing MySQL

Before we start, you should download MySQL here. It will ask you to login but at the bottom of the page there is a link ‘No thanks, just start my download.’ Click on it and your download will start. After you download the file, we will begin installing by opening it.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: We will confirm everything that we are asked. After the installation has finished, a pop-up window will be displayed that gives you the temporary generated password for our MySQL. You MUST save it where you can reach easily. Because we will use it in our following configurations.

When your saving process has finished, you can close the window by clicking OK button and open Terminal again. In Terminal, type in:

sudo mkdir /var/mysql

and then:

sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock

This code will create a short link for our MySQL which will be needed for phpMyAdmin later.

To start MySQL Server, go to System Preferences on your mac, and you will see the MySQL symbol. Just click on it and there you will see the button Start MySQL Server. Click on that button and your MySQL Server has started.

To ensure that our MySQL Server is working properly, go to Terminal again and type the following:

cd /usr/local/mysql/bin

and then:

sudo /mysql -u root -p

The last code line will ask you for a password but this time we will use our temporary MySQL password that we saved previously during the installation. Just copy paste and press enter. You will see the following:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.

Your MySQL connection id is 2

Server version: 5.7.23 MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Copyright © 2000, 2018, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its

affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective

owners.

Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the current input statement.

mysql>

If everything is ok thus far, we will change the administrator password to an optional one. While you are still in MySQL, type the following:

ALTER USER ‘root’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

Here, you will replace the ‘password’ to whatever you would like to use in the future. (do not delete quotation marks)

If we are done with it, we will exit MySQL by typing:

exit;

and hit the Enter button. Finally we can start installing phpMyadmin.

Installing phpMyAdmin

In order to install phpMyAdmin, you should first download it here. At the bottom of the page, you will see the file named ‘phpMyAdmin-4.6.6-english.zip’. Just click on it and your download will start. Once it has been downloaded, we will simply drag it on your /Library/WebServer/Documents folder. In that folder, we must unzip the file and delete the original .zip one. After that, we will rename that folder from ‘phpMyAdmin-4.6.6-english’ to only ‘phpMyAdmin’.

After we are done with that, let’s go back to our Terminal and type in the following:

cd /Library/WebServer/Documents/

and then

cd phpMyadmin

By doing this, we will change our directory to the folder that we’ve just renamed. Now let’s create a config folder by typing the following:

sudo mkdir config

and give it some rights by typing:

sudo chmod o+x config

Now we can head in to our web browser and type the following in order to setup phpMyAdmin:

localhost/phpmyadmin/setup/

Here we see the setup page and let’s hit the ‘ New Server’ button. We should go to the ‘Authentication’ tab and fill the ‘Password for config auth’ section with our new password that we’ve created by typing “ALTER USER root…..”

Later on, we will click on ‘Apply’ button and then we will click on ‘Download’. Your web browser will download a file that is named ‘config.inc.php’. Just drag it on the /Library/WebServer/Documents/phpMyAdmin folder and we are done with that.

Now we can go to

localhost/phpmyadmin

on our web browser and login with the username ‘root’ and the password that you’ve chosen before.

Finally we have a fully operational WebServer with Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin. I hope everything went well and see you on my future posts!

Original Article : https://medium.com/@ozgenbaris/how-to-run-apache-php-mysql-and-phpmyadmin-on-macos-sierra-3d2df5fce2e4

Share this post