PHP and Web Hosting with Mac

How to Start Up and Have Fun with Your Free OSX Server

In the summer of 2003 I was what you might call programming illiterate. I have always used and loved Macintosh computers, but if you asked me how to construct a web page, let alone set up a server with PHP capabilities, I would have been about as useful as a professional tennis player teaching advanced microbiology. That was until I enrolled in a community college HTML course, and came across a useful site on the internet and an excellent book on PHP & MySQL, all of which teach you how to construct and run PHP scripts from your Mac OSX.

Starting up the Server

As it turns out, the Mac OSX operating system (the original OSX, Jaguar, Panther, and now Tiger) ships with a little gem of a web server called Apache, a dynamic and very easy to use piece of Open Source software that lets you host a web site from your own computer.

Starting up the server is easy. Just open System Preferences, click on the Sharing pane, select ‘Personal Web Sharing,' and click on the Start button to activate the server. Voilá, your site should appear in your browser at the address "127.0.0.1."
If this web address seems strange to you, just think of it as the defualt address used to access the site or web page stored on your computer. Every web address you enter into your browser is also some combination of four numbers, separated by periods (.). The name ‘www.yahoo.com', for example, is used to replace the numbered address, so that it is easier for you to type and remember. The address "127.0.0.1" is the number used to designate the "localhost" address, or in other words, the default address of the site hosted by the computer you are currently on.

At "127.0.0.1" you should see a web page saying:

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.