You’ve just installed Mavericks on your lovely Mac, and want to do some web development, probably with PHP. Things are made simple for us in this version. I’m on 10.9.4 - others may need some other changes on anything older releases of Mavericks. I like to have folders in a Sites directory within my user folder, and my URLs as localhost/[folder-name] - edit if you want your sites somewhere else.

Let’s start apache, in terminal (command line) type sudo apachectl start and hit enter. Set your browser to ‘http://localhost’ and you should see ‘It works!’. Good.

Next setp: I’m using my favourite command line editor, vi:

Line 170, change the DocumentRoot to:

and also line 197:

Line 217 change AllowOverride to “All” so that we can use .htaccess to modify any settings for our local sites

AllowOverride All

PHP

To setup PHP, uncomment line 118 of LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so in the same file.

To see your changes, restart apache with: sudo apachectl restart

Test it’s all working:

Create a folder within Users/[username]/Sites, add an index.php with some php <?php echo 'working'; and browse to it:

This guide is based on Brian Love’s Mavericks Apache guide