Permalinks on Mac OS

Mac OS X has Apache and PHP built in. I installed MySQL and set up a localhost WordPress install on it. Everything looked good, until I tried to enable pretty permalinks. The pretty links just didn’t work.

The Codex page indicates that FollowSymLinks must be enabled and AllowOverride should be All (or FileInfo). I tried putting that into the httpd.conf file but that didn’t work.

It took a while to realise that I was putting those directives into the section for the web root directory and not the user specific folder where I had actually put the site. Following the trail of includes in the well commented config files, I found my user Apache config in /etc/apache2/users/.conf

Added those options into the config file and permalinks are working 🙂

EDIT: Upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion and it uses a different set of configuration files. It looks like user config files aren’t created by default so I just changed the default directive.

SVN Tip

I run a few localhost installs of WordPress for testing and experimentation. They are installed using the svn method, as outlined in the Codex.

At first, I would go in manually to each folder to svn up occasionally. This got tiresome after a while so I wrote a simple bash script to cd to each folder and run svn up

Recently, I discovered that there’s a shortcut. All I have to do is to go to the parent directory and type svn up *

This will run the command on all the subfolders and thus bring all my sites up to date.