During this guide you’ll be working through the following items: Having a local development environment that also offers a web server makes mimicking real world scenarios much more realistic, while also allowing you to experiment with your code without having to worry about it being live on the web, out in the wild (no more fussing with “hiding” sites on the web). The benefit of developing websites and web applications locally on your Mac is the ability to make use of some awesome development tools without any risk to your production environment. This guide will help you set up a Document Root within your Home directory, enable and configure name-based Apache Virtual Hosts, and also get the local PHP up and running for web development. We’re going to set up a local web development environment using the bundled Apache web server that comes with OS X El Capitan. To get things running smoothly again, I started to go through my usual Apache checklist and then realized that this process would serve as an awesome guide to help other Mac users leverage the bundled Apache web server for their local web development needs. I also had a strong suspicion that we would be getting a slightly updated version of Apache with El Capitan (currently version 2.4.16 vs. Chances were that these settings would be overwritten when upgrading. Issues and errors were expected of course as there was a decent amount of configuring done to Apache in Yosemite to set up a local web development environment to begin with.
Apache No Longer Works after Yosemite to El Capitan Upgrade With a fresh upgrade to the OS X 10.11 on my secondary machine (a modest 13” 2011 MacBook Air, corner dents and all), I fire up Terminal and Atom and… quickly find out that my local web development environment is out of whack and riddled with errors.
Now that the wait is finally over for common folk such as myself, who aren’t members of that posh Apple Developer program and its absurd $99 annual fee, I finally have the chance to investigate any changes to the bundled Apache web server. Since I’m not an iOS developer, OS X developer, nor do I want to spend $99 a year to gain early access to betas and other perks, I had to patiently wait for the Public Beta ever since El Capitan’s announcement and introduction during the WWDC 2015 keynote.
Updated 10/03/15: This guide has been updated to reflect the official release of OS X 10.11 El Capitan.īack in July, Apple finally released the public beta of Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Originally posted on DigitalShore.io on August 01, 2015
How to Set Up Apache in OS X 10.11 El Capitan