Personal web server on MacOS Sierra?
March 17, 2017 2:07 PM Subscribe
The MacOS used to offer one click personal websharing. But it seems that feature was taken out and moved to MacOS Server? Is there way to re-enable it in MacOS Sierra? Or does one simply download and install the server version along side the regular version? Sooooooo confused!
These days, macOS Server is just an addon that you can get from the App Store if you think it's worth $20 to be able to check a box to start Apache instead of doing it from the command line as described in w0mbat's answer.
posted by zsazsa at 2:42 PM on March 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by zsazsa at 2:42 PM on March 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
Beyond the simplest personal website, serving websites from a Mac has become an exercise in frustration. Apple seems to want to deprecate the functionality out of existence. ClickOnTyler makes a few solid and respected apps that make it a little easier to run a basic static site and configure virtual hosts, or you can run an instance of MAMP or a virtual Linux machine, but running Apache/PHP/MySQL natively on OSX -- even with the pathetically terrible Server.app, is a nightmare anymore if you do anything that involves a database or dynamic scripting. It's there and it works but it breaks with every new OS version and doesn't play well with homebrew etc. They also don't make any suitable hardware anymore for anything but a development machine. There are a ton of guides out there for making it work. But if you're planning to run Wordpress or Drupal etc. trust me, get a cheap commercial host or buy a Linux server.
posted by spitbull at 3:11 PM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by spitbull at 3:11 PM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
Best answer: You might check out Caddy. It's written in Go and is a single executable file webserver that supports a surprising amount of handy stuff. Automatic LetsEncrypt SSL certs, HTTPS/2, automatic dynamic DNS registration, FastCGI (for PHP), yadda yadda. All in a single binary with no dependencies and one config file.
I've used it a couple of times on machines where I didn't know the OS specifics and didn't want to try to get apache/nginx installed and configured or even make some Python/Perl simple HTTP server foo work. With Caddy you just copy one file and a simple config and it runs and you're done.
But if you can just start apache and get what you were expecting, go for it
posted by zengargoyle at 3:41 PM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
I've used it a couple of times on machines where I didn't know the OS specifics and didn't want to try to get apache/nginx installed and configured or even make some Python/Perl simple HTTP server foo work. With Caddy you just copy one file and a simple config and it runs and you're done.
But if you can just start apache and get what you were expecting, go for it
posted by zengargoyle at 3:41 PM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
Best answer: This site has useful and regularly updated guides to configuring AMP on each new version of OSX, widely used. The link is for their El Capitan guide.
posted by spitbull at 8:20 PM on March 17, 2017
posted by spitbull at 8:20 PM on March 17, 2017
I'm super bummed this isn't available by default anymore. That simple feature was hugely useful for me in learning CSS, for example, and other bits early in the 21st century. Making it harder to get to does a disservice to folks who want easy access to a simple Apache install. :(
posted by uberchet at 9:39 AM on March 20, 2017
posted by uberchet at 9:39 AM on March 20, 2017
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sudo apachectl start
The link gives further instruction.
posted by w0mbat at 2:17 PM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]