Backup / Restore a user on OS X

I can’t say enough about how important it is to occasionally backup your data. I’ve had several instances where doing this really saved me, and I’ve had friends who didn’t do it, and it has really cost them. I’m a firm believer in the awesomeness of Time Machine on the Mac. I’ve used it a few times to restore my system to a previous state, after I thought my system had been compromised, and it’s just a thing of beauty…for the most part.

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Installing PHP on OS X

As many of you may have noticed, one of the purposes of this blog is to act as my own personal notebook on how to configure things, but I’m glad to see it has provided benefit to others as well. That being said, it has been far too long since I’ve posted any information on this blog. Setting up my new laptop really through my routine out of whack. So as part of my New Year’s resolution, I resolve to do better, and post articles on a more frequent basis.

Speaking of my new laptop, I am now able to run OS X 10.6 or better, so all of my posts from now on will be discussing the newer OS.

But this post is about how to get PHP up and running on OS X, so let’s dig in.

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Automating Drupal cron with OS X’s launchd

Found this great post on Configuring cron on Mac OS X Server 10.5.x in the Drupal documentation. I’d been wanting to do that with my original post on Building a Drupal Multi-Site development environment, but I hadn’t had time to figure it out.

The title of the page at Drupal says “Mac OS X Server“, but there’s nothing that says you can’t use this technique on OS X Client, and I believe it will work on everything 10.4.x and up.

So I’m going to show you how to tie it into the Multi-Site setup I created on my local machine for the previous blog post.   Continue reading

Building a Drupal development environment for Mac

I’ve been working on understanding the Drupal CMS for the past couple of weeks, and it can be a little bit confusing.  As usual with an open source project most of the documentation focuses on Unix/Linux or Windows.  There is some good information for Mac users, but for me, it seemed a little disjointed and was hard to bring together for a coherent setup.  This is my attempt to explain a complete setup, from start to finish, for doing web development on my local machine running OS X 10.4.  I’m completely new to Drupal, so if I could have done something better here, please let me know.

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