MacZealots.com

Thanks for the how-to.

Thanks, this worked perfectly. I was wanting to experiment and had run out of hosted databases to play with.

Not wanting to detract from the article, but Miraz, you can always install it into an existing database as it uses a prefix on the database tables.

Subtle South Park references: awesome. This article was amazing before I even read it.

For those of you looking to upgrade your current PHP installation to PHP version 5.0, PHPMac.com has just published guidelines on upgrading your local installation of PHP to the newly released version 5.0 on Mac OS X v10.3 “Panther”.

Are there any OS X clients available to post to WordPress?

jg, Ecto works just fine with Wordpress.

http://www.kung-foo.tv/ecto/

Hi!

Must say that your are cool!
I had trouble all time with the installation of mysql on my 10.3.4 system but this was super. It just works and Iam very happy. THANKS!!!!

Fantastic, you make my life a whole lot easier every time I visit. Any chance of a drupal tutorial? Installation and templates?

Wow, did that make my life easier, thanks! Last year I tried to load mysql, and had to discover the chown of data/ the hard way. Putting together the big picture like this is absolutely fabulous for our community. Thanks again!

Um, I can’t figure out why everything works except clicking on the blog name directs to a link.local adrress (wohpe.local) rather than the URI…

Any suggestions?

Otherwise, amazing. thanks!

OK, I’m getting a big hangup here. I don’t belive I skipped any steps but I’m not able to load the index.php test at all.

I’ve gone through the steps a dozen times. Not like they were that complicated. To enable php you just uncomment the LoadModule setting and the AddModule setting for php.

I did that. I’m not an idiot I’ve built Linux from Scratch before. This is irritating. Any help appreciated.

Christ! Nevermind. So stupid. I’ll just be in this corner of the internet cowering in shame. Damn…

okay…I’ve RACKED my brain about how to get the PHP “test” above to work. I have YET to see the “page after page” of PHP info described above. I’ve retraced my steps MORE than 3 times (as recommended earlier) and can NOT figure out what I’m NOT doing.

Currently, I’ve got the WordPress directory contents DUMPED into my /webserver/documents folder…I have MySQL (apparently) up and running, PWS turned on…

Can’t figure it out. HELP!

Eric -

Don’t fret, we’ll get it working for you. The PHP info page should work regardless of MySQL, so we can eliminate that as a problem. To make sure PWS is working, go to a web browser and just enter http://localhost/ as the URL. If Apache’s up and running, you should see the index.html file that Apple ships with OS X. If not, then Apache’s the problem.

If that’s the case, you can go into the terminal and reset/restart Safari with sudo apachectl graceful. If it doesn’t want to restart, it’ll tell you why.

Try that, and reply to the comments with your results. Hope this helps!

Matt

I can’t configure MySQL :o(, error: “Mysql lost connection” is a bug in mysql?

wow, this thing is intensely amazing, I cannot Thank the authors enough. The tutorial was superb, and articulate.

Really, this thing has stepped the ladder of ultimate kewlness.

Man…I’m just all thumbs evidently. Matt, I’ve been around the block, I’m trying to start FRESH, but now I’m not getting MySQL configured. I get the following error in Terminal:

Last login: Thu Oct 7 19:59:56 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Eric-Nentrups-PowerBook:~ ericnentrup$ cd /usr/local/mysql
Eric-Nentrups-PowerBook:/usr/local/mysql ericnentrup$ sudo chown -R mysql data/
Eric-Nentrups-PowerBook:/usr/local/mysql ericnentrup$ sudo echo

Eric-Nentrups-PowerBook:/usr/local/mysql ericnentrup$ sudo ./bin/mysqld_safe &
1 971
Eric-Nentrups-PowerBook:/usr/local/mysql ericnentrup$ Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /usr/local/mysql/data
041007 20:03:34 mysqld ended

testlocal/mysql/bin/mysql
ERROR 2002: Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ (2)
1+ Done sudo ./bin/mysqld_safe
Eric-Nentrups-PowerBook:/usr/local/mysql ericnentrup$

I’ve tried to follow removal instructions and reinstallation of MySQL but I fear I’ve done something else wrong.

Thoughts about how to get a clean slate in all the directories?

hallelujah, I’m in like flint. Okay. Props to Matt. And though I had to get help elsewhere to fix my initial fumblings, this tutorial does the trick!!! Now….OFF TO BLOGLAND!!!

one more question…how do you CHANGE your MySQL password?

things are ROCKIN’ now!! And I’ve already got a customization of Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick Theme set as my default style.

Next issue to solve….I’ve turned on “virtual webserver” in my router’s control panel. But when I try to access my blog from the outside, the images and/or the css isn’t loading. there’s a space for the header but it isn’t loading.
Thoughts?

Okay, I’m going crazy here. I’ve followed this (wonderful!) tutorial twice through, and every time I get to loading http://127.0.0.1/blog/wp-admin/install.php in my browser, I get the message:

“Error establishing a database connection! This probably means that the connection information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect. Double check it and try again.

Are you sure you have the correct user/password?
Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
Are you sure that the database server is running?”

I’ve checked and rechecked my settings.
-The Web server is up and running; I can access my regular index.html site from my browser.
-The Loadmodule and Addmodule lines have been de-commented.
-I restarted Apache.
-index.php does indeed show a complete report of the PHP setup.
-The database I am using does exist and is properly referenced in wp_config.php.
-My password is also properly entered in wp_config.php.

The only thing I can see that differs from the tutorial is that I used themost recent recommended version of the MySQL package, version 4.1.5 for Mac OSX.

Anyhelp, folks? I’m going nuts here!

Many Thanks,

Andrew

Andrew -

First, I would go back to the SQL prompt where you enter the database to create the WordPress database, and make sure MySQL likes your password:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p

If that works OK, I would upgrade to MySQL 4.2.0. Even if the username and password are correct in the WordPress config, there may be a conflict in versions that is causing WordPress to ask something of the 4.1.5 MySQL install that it doesn’t understand - maybe a command that it doesn’t have, or something that wasn’t parsed as expected. It seems like everything else is working well, but try those steps and let me know if you have any progress. Thanks for reading!

Hi Matt!

Yeah, my install of MySQL likes my password all right. I even used the /u command to make sure that MySQL knew which database to use, no soap. Still get the error when running install.php.

Regarding upgrading to 4.2; I can’t find a version 4.2 for OS X on the MySQL website to which you link in this article, just 4.0, 4.1 and 5.0a. Should I make the jump to the 5 alpha? I’ve heard good things about it.

Also, do I need to “uninstall” the previous version first, or will it simply overwrite the older version? (I know I have to shut down the SQL server before doing installing).

Thanks so much for your help!!

Andrew

Andrew -

My mistake - 4.0.20 is the one you want. As with my last email, I would still recommend changing to 4.0.20. 4.1 is the gamma release, used for new features, none of which WordPress requires. Also, everyone who’s tried it with 4.0.20 has had success, so I stay we stick with what works for now and try it with 4.0.20. You should be able to install it right on top of the 4.1 install. Let me know how it works!

Hey Folks,

After a couple of hiccups and some great help from Matt, I got my MySQL and PHP configured. Then I made the mistake of adding Snort to my server (OS X Panther, non-server version), which seemed to hose any access to my MySQL database. Once I disabled NIDS and removed the Snort front end (a really nice package called HenWen), my MySQL root password would no longer work, and I had to flush it out and reset the password.

I can see how Snort might prevent proper access to MySQL, but I have my doubts that it could affect my root password for it. I’m beginning to think that the installation of Snort and my password problems were coincidental.

Anyone have any suggestions as to where to start with tracing the problem?

TIA,

Andrew

Hi,

It is possible to use MySQL 4.1.7 but they have changed the Password Hashing in MySQL 4.1

Wordpress doesn’t know about this but fortunately you can set the password in an other way so you can still use Wordpress.

Do the following:

mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR
-> ‘root’@’localhost’ = OLD_PASSWORD(‘password’);

For more info see here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Old_client.html

Hey everyone. First off Matt, great article. I’ve been playing around with MarsEdit w/ WordPress a bit but can’t seem to figure out how to upload images. I believe it has to do more with WordPress than the later. The Upload option in Wordpress states

It doesn’t look like you can use the file upload feature at this time because the directory you have specified (/Library/WebServer/Documents/blog/wp-content/) doesn’t appear to be writable by WordPress. Check the permissions on the directory and for typos.

Anyone know how to do this easily?

ok,
so i got this all to work on localhost and veiw it on my computer using apache. but how do you move this to your website. I mean I know how to FTP all of the pages, but what about this database that I jsut created. How do you get your wordpress database on the server.
thanks

Sweet! It really does work, to any of you that read webpages in reverse, maybe I can save you an hour. Matt’s post about mysql 4.0.20 was a godsend, I struggled with 4.1.0 and 4.1.7 and same head against same wall everytime. But 4.0.20 worked the first time (only took bout 10 minutes with the right info). Awesome awesome awesome, thanks Matt for answering, and thanks Uncle for questioning.

any chance of updating this for Tiger and the latest versions of WordPress?

Carl, updated versions of the WordPress, Textpattern and Drupal are on their way very shortly. Thanks!

I used this tutorial with Tiger and it worked flawlessly. I suggest getting the latest version of MySQL and then doing what Patrick suggested to make it work. Wordpress has yet to be updated to function w/ the authentication of the latest MySQL.

On a fresh install using Tiger, Wordpress 1.5.1 and MySQL 4.1.11, I get stuck following the instructions when I try to hit http://127.0.0.1/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

That gives me the following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_bloginfo() in /Library/WebServer/Documents/wordpress/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 304

Any help would be appreciated!

A tip of the hat to Matt for helping me along with this - downgrading to MySQL 4.0.24 did the trick.

Is there any other way to fix the get_bloginfo error without downgrading to MySQL 4.0.24? I’m doing a website for a friend, and I don’t have shell access. I uploaded everything, but I’m getting the same error when I try to run the install. Please help! Matt? :)

I previously downloaded and and installed xampp for OS X which includes the latest PHP, mysql, Apache, etc. But now that I’ve loaded it I have no idea how to adapt the above instructions to configure it for wordpress and I’m loath to spend another eon trying to download the 24mb mysql stand-alone to follow the above instructions. Any tips? Thanks

Barak

I’m running MySQL 4.1.12 on Mac OS 10.4.2 with PHP 4.

I ran through this tutorial and was fine up until I tried to load /wp-admin/install.php in Safari. I repeatedly, and frustratingly, ran into the “Cannot connect to database problem” and used Patrick’s idea of going here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Old_client.html

I used the Old_Password command to switch my password - I’d tried it before, but my problem was that I had uppercase letters and numbers in the password. When I tried it with an all-lowercase password, it worked fine. Now I’m up and running, hallelujah! Hope this helps someone else.

Thanks to all and thank you for a lovely article.

Hi Matt, thanks for the updated tutorial. Saved me from getting a bald head with this new client that needed to use WP.

Anyway, you might also want to touch on using mod\_rewrite which I found wasn’t setup properly by default in Tiger. I had to refer to http://www.four54.com/deheus/petrik/blog/post/33/ to enable mod\_rewrite to work.

great tutorials on this site… but they are all for users of Mac OSX Client…. any chance i can find the same tutorials, but for Mac OSX SERVER? (yes, there are significant differences). if the zealots don’t consider server tutorials a worthy subject, can anybody point me to similar CMS tutorials, but for OSXserver? thanks!

What a great tutorial for a great application. I installed it in less than 5 minutes (minus the downloading time for MySQL and Wordpress). One question though. On my current Wordpress installation (on my webhost) I use the plugin “Wordpress Backup” and I did a backup of my installation. I reinstalled the same plugin on my local Wordpress installation and placed the sql file in the backup folder and when I did a restore…it didn’t do anything. The database name is still the same (wordpress) and everything.

Any help? If not, I just wanted to say Thank You for the great tutorial.

Thanks for the great tutorial. I got through the install with these instructions, but I am having a really hard time getting permalinks to work correctly on my WP install. I get 404 errors when clicking on just about anything (Comments, Archives, Categories) from my main page. Other that that, most things seem to be functioning fine. PHP5 & MySQL4 load fine, .htaccess is writable, DB Creation was successful, its just the permalinks that do not work. When I turn them off, everything is fine. I think it is most likely a problem in my httpd.conf file or the mod_rewrite functionality, but I cannot figure it out.

Anyone have any experience getting Wordpress permalinks to work on OSX server 10.3.9?. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I understand installing a local copy of Wordpress is useful for testing, but what differences are there if you are hosting your real WordPress on someone else’s server? I have 2 sites 1 UNIX and 1 Linux.

Do I need to install multiple databases? what naming conventions should I use? Is enabling “Personal Websharing” necessary if I’m not serving the blog from my own Mac?

Sorry about the double post. To clarify: the questions were about the local copy of WordPress on my Mac, not on the remote host.

Marline -

Along with testing, many people actually run their sites from their personal computer.  Also, since the non-server version of OS X can still act as a server, many people use that instead of shelling out the money for OS X Server.  WordPress will definitely work on Unix and Linux.  These are just OS X-specific instructions; every OS has its unique steps.

As for the question about databases, you will need to only need to install MySQL once on the machine, but each installation of WordPress will need its own database.  If for some reason you can only have a single database (some ISP’s restrict customers to one) you can use prefixes to distinguish multiple “virtual” databases within the same physical database.  (I know how vague that is; let me know if this is the case and I can explain this more.)

If you’re not hosting any web sites locally (on your Mac), Personal Web Sharing is not necessary.

Jonathan -

I personally don’t have experience with .htaccess - I was excited enough to see the blog work. :) However, there is a post on WordPress’ support site that mentions the need to edit username.conf as well. Let me know if this helps any; if not, I’ll jump in with you and we’ll get this figured out.

Great how-to. Thanks for the work.

I’m having difficulty “Configuring MySQL” . I’m really sure how the commads are to be entered in the terminal. Enter following each line of code. When I do that, I’m ask for a password after the line “sudo chown -R mysql data/” ???? I really a novice. Please help.
Don

OK, I have my site up and running on my computer. My only problem is that some of the page is not loading. My computer in behind a Linksys Router. I have ports 80, 3306, and 21 forwarded to my machine. My CSS is not loading. Is there a port for CSS?

question answered. thanks Matt!!!

Matt’s suggestion to Brad:
Most likely, you have localhost specified as the URL in your WordPress configuration instead of a relative address (like ../index.php). Using localhost will work fine on your machine, but for anyone (including yourself) outside the machine, the code will look for the CSS on THEIR localhost. Change that and you should be good to go.

Brad, CSS does not have a port, it is simply a modification to html, make sure that your html pages have the proper external stylesheet chosen. To do so put this in the head section of the document: Also, I myself was having a problem with getting MySQL to work, when I tried typing in mysql in the terminal this is the message i get: ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ (2)

I’ve searched for it in Google, done what the tutorials have told me and I still can not figure out how to get this to work, someone please help me.

woops, brad what I told you to put in the document didn’t show up because it was formated w/ html tags, just go here: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1#containment-in-html

Don -

The password at that step is your OS X administrator password, which you created with the first account on the machine. You may have other administrators on your machine, which you can check in the Accounts preference pane of System Preferences, but the first account created is by default an administrator.

snipehack -

That error occurs because MySQL is not running. I would go back to step 4 (Configuring MySQL) and run those steps again.

Minor nitpick, but it says

> WordPress is another maature, capable and free blogging engine
^^^^^^^

Thanks for an otherwise great article :)

Oops, the carots in my previous remark should have been pointing out the ‘maature’ word.

Swaroop -

Thanks for the note; fixed!

Hello,

I reinstalled OS X Server 10.4.1 fresh, updated it, started the web server, enabled PHP, installed MySql from the Mac GUI tool that comes with OS X Server, created the database, created the users, and I still have the same Error establishing a database connection problem. :(

See: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/34738

Went without a hitch. Thanks.

I am running WP as an internal blog. If my internal IP were to change, is this a big deal to my install (besides the blog URL changing)?

Is there any reason that this won’t work on Panther?

Hey Matt, I’m having REAL problems. I’m trying to set=up WP on my mac. I have steps 1, 2 and 5 down. I get the PHP page by page deal no problem. What I don’t get is WP install.

I followed everything carefully but when I typed in http://localhost/blog/wp-admin/install.php. —> nothing. I do get A WP screen when I type in http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin. That tells me that it “CAN”T SELECT DATABASE—(which means your username and password is okay) but not able to select the wordpress database.”

The only area I had/have problems is in Configuring MySQL. I get through your instructions there fine until “Now that MySQL is running, we’ll change the root password of MySQL so that WordPress (and you) can access it later. Use this command (where yourpasswordhere is replaced by your chosen password): When I follow the next piece of code and add the password in the appropriate spot I get an error message which says this “/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at ‘localhost’ failed
error: ‘Access denied for user: ‘root@localhost’ (Using password: NO)’

Help, what’s going on!?!

Stuart

Just a minor correction, the WordPress version mentioned is 1.5.1.1, not 1.5.11. The latest is 1.5.1.2.

These were very minor fix releases, save for the major RSS bug fixed in 1.5.1.1.

Hi guys,

I’m somewhat new to the blogging community- specifically designing blogs for content management websites. I’m moving toward CMS though, since they’re easy to update. My question is after looking at WP websites and so on, I haven’t found anything that speaks about taking an html site from scratch and tweaking it for WP. If anyone can lead me to a good tutorial, that would be great. Thanks.

Check out these themes for the backend to make it look more like Mac OS X:
http://www.jgraphics.net/wordpress/spotpress/
http://www.orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-administration-design-tiger/

Well written article, it’s really useful (and still rare) for someone to take the trouble to spell out the individual steps clearly and not leave out some important (but vital) tiny step that power users take for granted but us ordinary folk don’t notice.

One problem I’m having - I’ve installed a test blog and it’s fine on the local machine BUT other Macs on the network only get as far as the front page, don’t even see the .css file. It seems that all the links in the code are absolute (in this case ‘localhost’) not relative (ie would be philsmachine.local on the local net). So the browsers don’t get to load anything after the front page I type in as ‘philsmachine.local/blog’. Where’d I go wrong?

MJ -

My first guess would be to follow the Apple support document that highlights an issue with MySQL and PHP on OS X Server.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301457

Past that, make sure the user is ‘root’ in wp-config.php; this is due to the default setup in OS X Server.

Tom -

Not at all. As long as you’re running it internally, just use localhost.

Al -

No; this will work just as well on Panther. The only thing you might want to add is a bit of code to httpd.conf which instructs Apache to recognize PHP files (Tiger’s copy of httpd.conf already contains this):

<IfModule mod_php4.c>
    AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
    AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps
    <IfModule mod_dir.c>
        DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
    </IfModule>
</IfModule>

Stuart -

This definitely is a confusing problem. If MySQL was never set up and the root password is blank, how could it possibly deny you permission? Strange indeed. What I would do is go back to the “Configuring MySQL” section and try those steps again, making sure you’re getting the desired output. Also, double check to make sure the command where you set the root password is typed perfectly.

Kidtrini -

I must admit I’ve never thought about a transition like that. Your best bet would be to head to Wordpress’ support page and look at questions dealing with static pages/sites; that should give you some insight on what it would take to transition over.

http://search.wordpress.org/transition+from+static+site+to+wordpress

I’ve been running this perfectly for about a month now (thanks so much!), but now I’ve been given a uni webspace and a mysql password and have been given the go ahead to host it there, which would suit me better. However, to move it, the Wordpress instructions say I have to edit the .sql file - I can’t find it anywhere in the finder! I’m a complete novice at this and wouldn’t know the first thing to type into the terminal without it being spelled out for me. I need to restore it as well as make a copy of it, before I do anything, can anyone help me out?

Thanks in advance, Jo

It was going so well! Then I was at my admin page, at the very last step of the tutorial when I clicked “view site”. Instead of seeing my site, I saw the test page for Apache Installation reading “If you can see this, it means that the installation of the Apache web server software on this system was successful. You may now add content to this directory and replace this page.”

I tried installing MT on my local machine and had the same behavior a few days earlier.
Thanks!

(powerbook g4 12” - OS X 10.4.2)

doh! fixed.

I too, had to use the old_password function to make my local install work. I’m running OSX 10.4.2, PHP 4.3.11, MySQL 4.1.12 on Apache 1.3.33…

Awesome article!

I seem to ahve the same prblem as Jeff: I receive the error when trying to go to my page �If you can see this, it means that the installation of the Apache web server software on this system was successful. You may now add content to this directory and replace this page.�

Jeff: how did you fix this? I can only see my MT page if I type in /index.php - just going to the IP address should work, but does not. Any ideas? Thanks.

Hi matt,
HELP! Ok, I followed the tutorial to the letter. I have it runing on two different servers. One is on my godaddy server (www.macmasterskully.com/wordpress/) that one is working perfectly! the other is on my mac (www.comprehensivesupportsystems.com/wordpress/) and is having a small glitch. it doesn’t send an email with a password when somebody signs-up to leave a comment. I have to enter it manually. Is there a fix for this? Please help!
jack

right on. thanks for the tutorial. I had been wrestling with installing everything listed here for quite some time and after switching the mysql version back to 4.0.n, it worked as stated.

Joannie -

Not to fear – it’s pretty easy to move your WordPress data around, so long as you take proper steps. I’m not sure what instructions you’re referring to, but to move the WordPress database, you need to do what’s called a “MySQL dump”, where all of that database’s information is “dumped” to a text file that can then be imported into another MySQL database. For this, I use the awesome (and free!) CocoaMySQL, found at:

http://cocoamysql.sourceforge.net/

After selecting the database, you can export it by selecting File > Export > CocoaMySQL dump… The resulting file will end in .sql. Still, though, you shouldn’t need to edit it; just find your new database and import (File > Import > CocoaMySQL dump…). Always be sure to hang on to the .sql file; this is a full backup of WordPress’ data and should be kept around just in case.

Jesse -

The problem you are experiencing is due to the fact that there is an index.html file in the same folder as the index.php file that belongs to WordPress. Since index.html is listed first as “recognized index files” in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, it is picked first. Delete it (and all those other language-specific index.html.* files, and Apache will see index.php first.

Skully -

Very good question, as most people don’t have this setting enabled. The reason that it’s working on your GoDaddy-hosted server is because the PHP script that sends the password uses sendmail, which is almost universally installed on service-hosted domains. However, OS X is not that, and does not have sendmail running. To fix this, you need to have sendmail or Postfix installed on your OS X box; another option is to use ssmtp, although I haven’t had any experience with this personally.
Here are links to more information on your question and how you can get mail to send:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Answers-Trouble_Shooting#Emailed_passwords_not_received
http://wordpress.org/support/topic.php?id=24981
http://packages.debian.org/stable/mail/ssmtp

Tried those links. the first one helped the most. I found postfix enabler for tiger (http://www.cutedgesystems.com/software/PostfixEnabler/). That got postfix running in one click! but I am still not getting emails out of wordpress’ registration setup. I will continue to hack away on this until I get it figured out. I’ll post my findings later. Thanks Matt!

Hi,
I want to first thank you for creating this great tutorial. Now I’ll slam you with my problem. I have followed this tutorial as a mean of installing MySQL and PHP. When I go to access the PHP page by page I get the following errors:

Warning: Unknown(/Library/WebServer/Documents/index2.php): failed to open stream: Permission denied in Unknown on line 0

Warning: (null)(): Failed opening ‘/Library/WebServer/Documents/index2.php’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php’) in Unknown on line 0

Ive tried to chmod 777 the files and that seems to do nothing. Any suggestions?

Fyi I am a newbie.

I’ve got exactly the same error and scenarios as reported in comments #22) by Uncle Andrew “Error establishing a database connection”

I’m using OS X.3.8. Installed the Entropy-PHP-4.3.11-1.dmg from Marc Liyanage’s site. Installed the latest mySQL for my OS mySQL Standard 4.1.13 using the instructions from this tutorial. Just like Uncle Andrew the database is there, the password works, etc., etc.

I haven’t figured out the old password thing mentioned in comments #27) . What am I looking for on the linked page? Am I supposed to type
mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR -> ‘root’@’localhost’ = OLD_PASSWORD(‘password’);

verbatim? or am I supposed to change “OLD_PASSWORD” and ‘password’ to something else? does this suggestion still apply? will it keep me from using the mySQL for some other applications?

One other thing…. I read that after installing mySQL there are initial root users that need to be secured and it linked to this page.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/default-privileges.html

Is there some un-secured user?

I was wondering what happened to the WP on Panther article, but I see this used to be it. :) I posted before about Personal Web Sharing comment #43) I still have the same concern about leaving PWS on when in order to test WP locally. Matt wrote in comment #45) that PWS isn’t necessary if I’m not hosting locally but the Apache test page http://localhost/ won’t open unless PWS is on.

How do you secure your Mac from being accessed from others on the internet if PWS is on? Am safe behind my router’s firewall but open to access by my Airport card?

Any pointers would be great. This is just for local testing.

Lee -

It looks like the permissions for the Documents folder (located @ /Library/WebServer/Documents) has the incorrect permissions. In Terminal make sure the permissions are set to 755 (drwxr-xr-x).

just what i need. I installed wordpress on my pc then bought an apple imac (love it) and was not sure how to set it up with all the reuirments of a local server. I knew that apache was already on though. Where would i go to find out how to set up phpmyadmin??

Absolutely right, I control clicked on all the files in the folder and set the permissions and now it works. Thanks again for your help, those guys at PHPmac have no idea what they are talking about lol. Thanks again for your help and for creating this tutorial for people like me.

The the local copy works now with a fresh install of php and mySQL (version 4.0.25). Matt was kind enough to email on my other questions, but unfortunately the old_password trick didn’t fix the issues with mySQL 4.1.13.

Thanks for the tutorial.

I did the chown command and some of the files get permission denied so I just ignored it then I ran the command to start mysql and I get slapped silly with this

ERROR 2002: Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ (2)

I did a grep command on it to see if it existed

and thats what I got

15241 std S+ 0:00.00 grep mysqld

hi, im running 10.3.9 got so far with this installation, just the last step, i know its simple, create the database for wordpress, i am an absolute dumbface, could somebody please help me correct this syntax, or tell me why, oh why it wont do the trick.

okay you can stop laughing and help me now. cheers - j

mysql> /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p
-> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
ERROR 1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE wordpress
mysql> quit\h

Worked fabulously, no hitches whatsoever.

I installed CocoaMySQL after that and am very happy. Thanks for the easy instructions!

after many hours trying to figure out what the problem is, my php.test file comes up empty i have discovered that i have 2 different installations of apache 1. something in the WebServer directory and the other in usr/local/blah blah with the apache 2 and php 5 installation. as an aside the gecko browsers go to the WebServer location when i do the localhost thingy and the webkit browsers like safari and shiira use the usr/local new apache and php installs. how do i delete the old? should i move the new to the WebServer location?

stop laughing!

Chapeu!

This site is fantastic! I would like to have some more tutorials like this one about wordpress.

Many greetings from Germany

i said stop laughing!
i have resolved my apache and php problems, and now i am running apache 2 and php4.3.9 everything seems fine except that when i run the install for wordpress i get the following error: “Error establishing a database connection” all the settings are correct, mysql 4.0.21 is running fine so what gives?

any thoughts?

well, i have just installed textpattern using matt’s other tutorial and i guess that narrows the problem to something with wordpress. textpattern is running fine on my local server.

Matt thanks for the tutorial, after much sweat, experimentation and research my wordpress is running perfectamente bien. looking forward to your next tutorial.

hi matt,

answer to your email: the only thing which I dislike is that there aren’t more such well organized and written tutorials in the web. and the thing you could improve is that you have to write more tutorials ;)

ciao from germany

domenik

I have this error after typing /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p this and entering my password i get ERROR 1045: Access denied for user: ‘root@localhost’ (Using password: YES) i also cannot set mysql password it gives error

Great, cheers. Worked a treat. I’ve installed the wordpress folder in mu user/sites folder as opposed to the top level web werver.

Please anyone, I am desperate for help. I’ve looked everywhere and no one is giving me the right answer.
My problems begin after I type (/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password mypassword)
I get this message in Terminal (error: Access denied for user: ‘root@localhost’ (Using password: NO)

Now, wordpress wont work (it used to), phpmyadmin wont work… nothing works.
I really need help.

I’m considering uninstalling mysql from my mac and reinstalling it… but I don’t know how! cries

If you can help, please please please please email me.
Thank you.

How do you use pico? This is my first time hosting a blog on my own (i decided to switch from Blogger ‘cos I’ll be moving to China EOY) and I have no experience with UNIX at all. So far I have survived on copy and paste, but saving and exiting pico beats me. Could some one tell me how?

Okay, so I managed to get past that one and everything’s working fine…except for one thing. How in the name of all that’s holy dya get the blog address? Can it be changed? And how do you import Blogger archives?

What is it with localhost.local? What is my FTP address? And how in God’s name is this thing going to work?

Nick -

By “blog address”, what are you referring to - the URL of the blog? As for importing Blogger content, check this page on the WordPress Codex:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content#Blogger

Nick -

Again, I’m not sure what you mean. localhost.local is the default address for localhost. the “.local” is added by OS X because it sees localhost as a Bonjour address; in the end it’s still just localhost. Your FTP address can be found by enabling FTP access in the Sharing preference pane of the System Preferences; the address will be printed below.

Byte -

You can uninstall MySQL using a script found on Marc Liyange’s web site:

http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/mysql/remove-old-mysql.html

He also has instructions on how to reinitialize the MySQL database:

http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/mysql/#reinit

Roy -

I would go though the MySQL setup process again. I can’t say I have a more definitive solution for you, but going through the motions again can often solve these types of problems.

Joel -

You need to enter the /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql command in your shell, not the MySQL prompt. Open a new Terminal window; THAT’s the shell you want to be in.

Hi everyone,

First, great post - very informative. Oh, that the online world was all made of such as these.

I’ve been running a blog of .Mac using the iBlog app, and have decided to move over to WP. I think I’ve got everything running smoothly with a good customization to a “connections” themeset and am just about ready to spring my new site upon an amazed world but…

I’m running a family-wide network behind the Airport Base Station Extreme wireless router, and as such, I’ve been relegated a subnet mask of 10.0.1.3 (or summat) behind the server - in any case, definitely not an externally accessible url. How do I get out from under? Or am I firewalled off?

Appreciate any assistance in advance…

Lex -

By subnet mask, I’ll assume you’re referring to the machine’s IP address. I do something very similar to you, albeit for a different reason. I access my machine from work via Apple’s Remote Desktop package, but also have a 10.0.1.x address. To get around this I have port forwarding enabling on my Base Station. Have the public port 80 forwarded to the private port 80 of 10.0.1.3 (or whatever your IP address happens to be). This will make more sense when you go to configure the Base Station.

The only problem you may run into is that, since your Mac’s IP address is handed out via DHCP, it may change. In that case, you’ll have to update the Base Station to reflect the new address. (I have to restart my [original] Base Station when I update the port forwarding information; I’m not sure if the new fancy ones have to do that or not.)

Way cool…

Patrick, thanks. Saved me a lot of trouble. I was getting to the point where I was just gonna say “sod it” and go back to writing each page individually

I got this error

127:/usr/local/mysql Jailanis$ sudo ./bin/mysqld_safe &
1 1495
127:/usr/local/mysql Jailanis$ Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /usr/local/mysql/data
STOPPING server from pid file /usr/local/mysql/data/127.0.0.1.pid
050911 21:03:48 mysqld ended

What did I do wrong here? And of course, how to fix it?

TIA

Your tutorial is awesome.

I gave your website props on my about page.
http://www.johram.com/blog/?page_id=7

later,
johnny

Dan wrote “just what i need. I installed wordpress on my pc then bought an apple imac (love it) and was not sure how to set it up with all the reuirments of a local server. I knew that apache was already on though. Where would i go to find out how to set up phpmyadmin??”

I just downloaded phpmyadmin, dragged the folder into my sites folder and renamed it to give an easier address, and then edited the config.inc.php file to set the ‘root’ and ‘yourpassword’ in the server config section (a screen or so down the file). Sees the tables fine - I’m on Panther 10.3.9.

Nice tutorial!

Hello: I am trying to follow the above instructions. I am unable to to change the root word of Mysql so that wordpress will recongnize it (whatever that means). All I get is the following message: /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at ‘localhost’ failed
error: ‘Access denied for user ‘root’@’localhost’ (using password: NO)’

Knowing nothing about Unix, I have no clue what this means, or how to proceed. Any help would be appreciated.

Thomas

I cannot get Mysql version 4.0.26 to install on OSX Tiger. When I click the installer. I get a message that there is nothing to install. Any ideas?

hi,
after typing
cd /usr/local/mysql
sudo chown -R mysql data/

i got this message:
We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Password:

then i am unable to type anything. i am an administrator and using mySQL 4.0.26, if it relates in any way to this problem

could anyone please help me out here? thanks!

oh erm it’s alright now. realised it doesn’t show when i type password. silly me.

Thomas -

This error means that the MySQL daemon (which listens for requests from things like WP) is not running. You will need to go through the “Configuring MySQL” section of the tutorial again.

hi me again,

RE: enabling and testing PHP

i am unable to find the httpd.conf file in apache. did a system search and no such file turns out. however i can edit the http.conf file in the terminal (is that the editor the tutorial refers to?). can i save the httpd.conf in the terminal itself? my file name would then be httpd.conf.term. i changed it in the ‘file info’ to httpd.conf. is this right? then where should i place this new file.

when i try and test PHP, it doesn’t work! basically i get gibberish. however my apache is fine when i checked http://localhost.

PS: when i redo the steps again, the changes that i made (uncommenting) do not work.

thanks for any help!

Thx again for the step by step, I have used this a long while ago and came back again after changing machines.
Just to let you know I used the new version of Wordpress and still worked like a charm.

Terrin I think the there’s a chance of your Mysql download got corrupted as I had no probs with the one from the link in the article. Good luck

rQ -

You should edit the file in the Terminal, through a UNIX editor like pico. To do so, find the file in /etc/httpd and open it in pico as such:

sudo pico /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

Make your changes, hit control-O -> enter to save, then control-X. Restart Apache with “sudo apachectl graceful” and you’re all set.

Hello Matt—

First, thank you for making this forum available.

When I try to make sure that PHP is running in my browser I get a 404 Error saying “The requested URL /test.php was not found on this server.” I believe Apache is running fine. I think maybe it went wrong when trying to save the test.php file in SubEthaEdit — when I click Save As it doesn’t give me a choice of saving it to /Library/WebServer/Documents. I tried saving it to just plain Documents and to Macintosh HD but neither works.

It could also be when I edited the httpd.conf file as suggested in the comments section to do this in Panther.

I am having a devil of a time with this. It went alright till I hit the sql password part and no matter what i do it keeps saying:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at ‘localhost’ failed
error: ‘Access denied for user: ‘root@localhost’ (Using password: NO)’

However, mySQL seems to be connected alright, any suggestions for me?

Hi,
Thanks for the great tutorial. After struggling with getting mySQL to run for an hour or so I found this page and after cleaning out sql 4.1 and replacing it with 4.0 everything was working fine.

Thanks Again.

Thank you!

Worked immediately, great tutorial.

Wow I’ve been trying to get php running on my machine for so long. I develop WordPress themes and this makes life a lot easier than constant FTPing.

Hi matt,

I have been following comments trying to figure out how to uncomment LoadModule php4_module and just about got what I needed from post#12 when I accidently pressed ctrl k instead of ctrl u and when things dissapeared, I pressed it a few more times. I really don’t want to be afraid of the terminal but I don’t know what I did or if Imessed everythign up and I still don’t know how to delete just teh # and not the whole line. Was hoping to figure things out without asking for help, but looks like I need some. Thanks

Josh

I have been following comments trying to figure out how to uncomment LoadModule php4_module and just about got what I needed from post#12

Should be 121

Ok, I got the page after page stuff, sorry for freaking out. I figured that cause I didn’t save anything if I quit and then did it again all would be smiles. And I finally figured out (duh) that if something is hilighted, you hit delete and the item behind it goes away, not the hilighted character. thanks for this great tut.

Josh

Hi, friends. I’m stuck at the Modify httpd stage. My PowerBook apparently doesn’t have pico, but uses nano automatically when pico is invoked. That’s all well and good, but there is no data in the httpd file. You suggest that there should be pages and pages of data, and then give instructions on modifying the file. On my mac there’s nothing to modify.

MySQL is running with no problem, and I can get to the Apache top page by going to localhost/

Can you help? I confess I’m new to Terminal and UNIX

This infos is cool, recently i am running my wordpress under windows using XAMPP Apache package software and had the idea if there is something way to run also Wordpress on Mac and found this - thanks for the tutorials i am now going to test this on my new Powerbook G4. Thanks Mate. :)

Great tutorial but the link to download mysql seems to be broken. It’s easy enough to find though & I got it working on the first try, thanks.

Many thanks for the tutorial.

This is a fabulous tutorial! I installed it on an eMac at school, and I want to use it for language arts activities. I am missing the part about configuring the mail. If a user creates their own name, the password is mailed to the email address given. How do I configure, what do I configure, or what do I do to have the passwords mailed to the new user. (Otherwise, I have a lot of typing to do.)

Hi,

Tanks for the tutorial, fabulous,

Thanks! it was very useful!

how would i back up my databases? i’ve searched online and most of the tutorials/how-tos are about backing up from a server. i’m hosting my own server with wordpress and mysql on my own computer. if i just copy the wordpress directory, would that be enough? thanks

How do I install WordPress on Panther Server, can´t find the tutorial?

Mikko

Nice blog, Have a good day.

Thanks very much.

This is one of the best tutorial I have come across.
I did manage to get WordPress(1.5.2) working with MySQL (5.0.15). The ‘Old Password’ im mysql does the trick.

Thanks once again. - sanjay

I developed locally, then uploaded my site, but I got stuck with the database upload.

Issue 1: Make sure you select mysql4 compatibility when you are exporting your database locally. (I used phpmyadmin.)

issue 2: If you are having problems logging into your admin panel after moving your site from local to server, be sure to check out this page: http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/site-url/

It describes the process of altering your database to jive with your site’s new address. (So it will stop looking for the local address when you login.) This was an invaluable tutorial for me, and there are several other folks who commented here with the same problem and didn’t get this answer yet.

- chris

Hello,
First off: amazing tutorial, really! It was a breeze to set up (once I realized that I had installed the wrong MySQL). I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on providing access to outside visitors:

I’m running WP on my Mac at home, that sits behind a Dlink router. I’ve had no problem seeing it from the computer that it’s running on but I would like to be able to access it from my PB on the same network. I noticed some advice:

Matt’s suggestion to Brad: Most likely, you have localhost specified as the URL in your WordPress configuration instead of a relative address (like ../index.php). Using localhost will work fine on your machine, but for anyone (including yourself) outside the machine, the code will look for the CSS on THEIR localhost. Change that and you should be good to go.

I just can’t seem to figure it out. What do I need to change in the Options section of WP? The WP URL or the Blog URL or neither?

Any help is much appreciated and thanks, again, for a wonderful tutorial!!!

ok i followed the tutorial and everything worked perfect with mysql 5 until i ran the config.php and got the unable to connect error. i saw that i should have used 4.0 and went to http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/mysql/remove-old-mysql.html to try and remove the version i installed. i downloaded the package and ran the command to remove it and this is what i got:

das-wunder-boxen:~ eric$ sudo sh remove-old-mysql.sh

I was not able to find information about the old package, cannot continue.

any help or other methods of removing or fixing the problem with connection?

nevermind guys, the OLD_PASSWORD method fixed it up with no problem. great tutorial and additional help<