Tag Archives: osx

Mac OS X Lion PHP upgrade – php.ini and Suhosin

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If you have upgraded from Snow Leopard to the new OS X Lion, you will notice PHP has also been upgraded – from 5.2 to 5.3.

A couple of points that I noticed post-install. Firstly, my existing /etc/php.ini file was moved to /etc/php.ini-5.2-previous. Restoring this was trivial:

sudo cp /etc/php.ini-5.2-previous /etc/php.ini

However, I noticed that extensions previously installed under /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/ had been removed. So, if you have extensions that you wish to still use with 5.3, they will need to be re-built.

I also noticed that Apple have included the Suhosin patch and extension. Suhosin is part of the Hardened-PHP project which aims to protect PHP applications against buffer-overflow and format string vulnerabilities. In theory, this functionality should be transparent to your application – no configuration or code changes are required.

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Fix PHP timezone warnings in OS X Snow Leopard

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The standard Mac install of PHP has always been somewhat quirky, and 10.6 is no exception. One of the most obvious issues occurs when attempting to use date/time functions. PHP 5.3 requires that the date.timezone setting is available. Without this, you will receive a warning similar to the following:

Warning: getdate() [function.getdate]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Europe/London' for 'BST/1.0/DST' instead in /Users/gscott/Sites/hello-world.php on line 9

The solution is to edit (or create, if it doesn’t exist) /private/etc/php.ini and make sure a setting exists for date.timezone. For example:

date.timezone = Europe/London

After making the change, restart Apache

sudo apachectl restart

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Installing Subversion 1.5 on Mac OS X

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My current project at Yahoo! is using a Subversion repository for version control, as opposed to the usual CVS (thankfully). Unfortunately, it turns out that the svn client installed on Mac OS X Leopard up to and including 10.5.6, is 1.4 whereas the “best” release is 1.5.

It’s very simple to get the newer 1.5 version up and running by compiling from source:

This will install Subversion 1.5 in your /usr/local path.

I added the --without-sasl option to prevent the following error from occurring when committing files:

svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Cannot negotiate authentication mechanism

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Useless Mac Applications #1 : Sherlock

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Bundled with Mac OS 8.5 – 10.4, the Sherlock search tool became less and less useful as time went by. Apple claimed that Sherlock was “dramatically better than standard web browsers at retrieving and displaying some of the most practical and useful information available on the internet” without ever explaining why. The US-centric content was pretty much useless, and so it always remained a curiosity. That it even made it to OS X was a surprise, it was finally made obsolete by Spotlight and Dashboard and removed completely from 10.5 Leopard. Good riddance!
Sherlock

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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