Apache

About a year ago, I had moved to a Macbook Pro and had to set up my development environment on it. It was far from straight forward and involved a bit of work.

A year on from that time, I have moved laptops again and this time I have a Macbook and OS X Leopard Version 10.5.5 and there is a world of a difference out there.

I am not sure whether it was something that I was previously doing wrong or if the packages are now being better maintained towards OS X, but compilation and installation has been a breeze this time.

The only thing that I had installed before I got started was Xcode from the install DVD.

If your Xcode package is not the latest and greatest, do get to the Apple Developer Connection and grab it.

The list of software we will finally end up is something like this:

• Apache (2.2.10)
• mod_python (3.3.1)
• MySQL (5.5.1.29-rc)
• PostgreSQL (8.3.5)
• Memcached (1.2.6)
• PHP (5.2.6)
• CouchDB

All the packages are installed in such a manner that they are installed into /usr/local/{software-name}-{version}, from which it is symlinked to /usr/local/{software-name}.

This will enable us to keep track of all the package versions and also switch between the versions in case of any trouble.

Time to start the process:

This is by no means meant to represent a scientific evaluation, nor should it be seen as the absolute word on what other tweaks could be done to extract maximum performance out of either MemcacheDB or CouchDB. The components are mostly running with out-of-the-box settings and my aim was to get it as close as possible to what my needs are in the production set up I deal with. You may have a different way of setting the infrastructure up.

Moreover, it is really not a brilliant idea to compare CouchDB with MemcacheDB. Both represent and do things differently and are, honestly, meant to be used for different things. I already have a set up in place which offloads a lot of front-end data crunching to Memcached and it is the lack of persistence in that led me to look for MemcacheDB and CouchDB.

Again, it is not a fair comparison because CouchDB can, in one request, get all the data needed for a particular record, while MemcachedDB would require multiple requests to cobble together a similar data set. Thus, CouchDB can afford to be slower and a bit more expensive in terms of requests. Then there is also the additional penalty of having to reconstruct the logic to assemble the data together for MemcacheDB, which won't show up in a test like this. But the results do throw up some very interesting results.

Notes

1. We won't be running any binary installations, all software will be compiled from source.
2. The installation won't make use of Fink or Darwinports either.
3. These are instructions for the Intel Macs.
4. Using this approach would mean that you will need to maintain the stack by hand.
5. Use this information at your own risk.
6. If you don't want to go through all the trouble and use a binary installation, read this post.

The software stack we are going to install will be as follows:

Apache HTTP Server 2.2.6

Modules
core
mod_authn_file
mod_authn_dbm
mod_authn_default
mod_authz_host
mod_authz_groupfile
mod_authz_user
mod_authz_default
mod_auth_basic
mod_include
mod_filter
mod_log_config
mod_env
mod_setenvif
mod_ssl
prefork
http_core
mod_mime
mod_dav
mod_status
mod_autoindex
mod_asis
mod_info
mod_cgi
mod_dav_fs
mod_negotiation
mod_dir
mod_actions
mod_speling
mod_alias
mod_rewrite
mod_so
mod_php5

PHP 5.2.5

Modules
bz2
calendar
ctype
curl
date
dom
exif
filter
gd
hash
iconv
json
ldap
libxml
mbstring
mysql
mysqli
pcre
PDO
pdo_mysql
pdo_pgsql
pdo_sqlite
pgsql
posix
session
SimpleXML
snmp
SPL
SQLite
standard
tidy
tokenizer
xml
xmlreader
xmlrpc
xmlwriter
xsl
zlib

MySQL 5.1.22 RC

Stock install

Postgresql 8.2.5

Stock install

We will also need to install the following software dependencies:

1. Xcode (from the Leopard DVD or Apple Developer connection )
2. Readline (http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html)
3. Tidy (http://tidy.sourceforge.net)

This installation would not have been possible without help from the following websites:

1. Installing Readline on OSX without using Fink or Darwinports
2. Workaround for Tidy's platform.h problem
3. Installing the GD library on OSX Leopard

Now to the installation:

Install Xcode

Install MySQL

Download mysql-5.1.22-rc.tar.gz from the http://dev.mysql.com website
Uncompress
$/configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql
$make
$sudo make install

Update: The steps did help me in getting to install the server, but on start up it did give certain location-specific errors.

As Hill has pointed out in the comments, MySQL.com has not released a version of their software for Leopard, but I got 5.1.22 RC to install, run and connect from PHP without any hassles following the instructions in one of the links he had kindly posted.

Install Readline

Download the source from ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-5.2.tar.gz
Uncompress
$./configure
There are bugs with the installation as elaborated in this link with workarounds:
$make static
$sudo make install static

Install Postgresql

Download the source from http://www.postgresql.org
Uncompress
$./configure --with-prefix=/usr/local/postgresql
$make
$sudo make install

Install GD

Follow the instructions at Veola.net

Install Tidy

Download Tidy source
Uncompress
$./configure
$make
This will throw up errors that can be fixed by following these instructions
$sudo make install

Install Apache

$CFLAGS="-arch i386 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk"
$./configure \
--prefix=/usr/local/apache2 \
--enable-authn-dbm \
--enable-ssl \
--enable-dav \
--enable-info \
--enable-speling \
--disable-userdir \
--enable-rewrite \
--enable-so \
--with-ssl=/usr/bin

if you get an apr.h error regarding sendfile, edit the apr.h file in srclib/ext/includes and change APR_HAS_SENDFILE to '0'

$make
$sudo make install

Install PHP

$./configure \
--with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs \
--prefix=/usr/local/php \
--with-pgsql=/usr/local/postgresql \
--with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
--with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config \
--with-tidy=/usr \
--with-curl=/usr/bin \
--with-curlwrappers \
--with-openssl-dir=/usr/bin \
--with-gd \
--with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib \
--with-png-dir=/usr/X11R6 \
--with-zlib-dir=/usr \
--with-freetype-dir=/usr/X11R6 \
--enable-mbstring \
--with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6 \
--with-pdo-pgsql=/usr/local/postgresql \
--with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
--with-xsl=/usr/bin \
--with-ldap \
--with-xmlrpc \
--with-iconv-dir=/usr \
--with-snmp=/usr --enable-exif \
--enable-calendar \
--with-bz2=/usr \
--enable-debug

$make
$sudo make install

And that's all folks!