A Smarter MAMP

Oct 22 2008

This past weekend, I was cleaning up my ~/Sites folder, and I started thinking, “There’s got to be a better way!” And I wasn’t referring to baby hammock. I was talking about having to set up all those virtual hosts and whatnot. Well, a little research quickly brought me to the “how did I not know this before?!” point. And now, I will share it with you.

(Editor’s Note: This article turned out to be a little longer than I expected. The whole process is really quite simple. It should only take about 10 minutes, at the most.)

The first thing I didn’t realize is that Apache supports something called dynamic virtual hosts. That means you don’t have to create a virtual host in your conf files and restart Apache every time you want to create a new site. This is incredibly handy for development. Combine that with a real DNS server (BIND), and you have a much smarter system. I can now create a whole new site on my MacBook just by creating a new folder! Much simpler than the old way.

The Old Way?

To put this in context, let’s quickly review the old way. For years, I’ve developed websites on Mac OS X using the standard ‘MAMP’ setup: Mac/Apache/MySQL/PHP. When starting a new site, the first thing I do is set up a virtual host for Apache. If you’re like me, you know this as a 4-step process:

Create a directory for the site’s files. Something like: mkdir -p ~/Sites/domain.com/public
Create a line in /etc/hosts for the domain: 127.0.0.1 domain.dev

Add a few lines to my Apache conf file to configure the virtual host:

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName domain.dev
    DocumentRoot /Users/jason/Sites/domain.com/public
</VirtualHost>

Restart Apache: sudo apachectl graceful

The New Way!

Create a directory for the site’s files. Something like: mkdir -p ~/Sites/domain.com/public

Done.

Not only that, but I also decided to set up a few TLDs to separate my sites. I use .ppm for my personal and freelance sites, .dev for my experimental stuff, and .bsi for my company work. This allows me to separate sites like so:

Sites
|-- bsi
|   |-- this
|   |-- that
|   `-- theother
|-- dev
|   |-- experiment1
|   |-- experiment2
|   |-- youget
|   `-- thepoint
`-- ppm
    |-- postpostmodern
    `-- littlebeestudio

These would be:

this.bsi
that.bsi
theother.bsi
postpostmodern.ppm
littlebeestudio.ppm
experiment1.dev
experiment2.dev
youget.dev
thepoint.dev

First, let’s talk about the hosts file.

The first thing you need for an Apache virtual host is a unique hostname. As can be seen in step 2, above, this is usually accomplished via the /etc/hosts file. The only problem is the hosts file doesn’t support any wildcards. So, you can’t say:

127.0.0.1    *.dev

Instead, you have to have this:

127.0.0.1    postpostmodern.dev
127.0.0.1    littlebeestudio.dev
...
...

…and eventually, you end up with a hosts file a mile long.

Enter BIND — the built-in, but inactive DNS server

BIND (named) comes with Mac OS X. We just need to configure it and turn it on.

I should mention here that DNS server stuff falls outside of my comfort zone. I just followed a few articles (on macosxhints and Ubuntu Forums) to get this working. I’m not sure how it impacts the vulnerability of your Mac from a security standpoint. All I know is that it works and provides a few advantages over the hosts file:

You can set up TLDs to resolve to your local IP address. So, anything.dev and anything.test will automatically stay local.
Apparently, since BIND will be caching DNS info, it will make web browsing faster. I haven’t formally tested this, but if it’s true, it’s a nice bonus. It does seem a little quicker.

Setting up rndc

This creates a configuration file and key for rndc, which controls named.

Get into sudo, and make it stick.

sudo -s

Generate the conf file.

rndc-confgen > /etc/rndc.conf

Copy the key to the key file.

head -n 6 /etc/rndc.conf > /etc/rndc.key

Exit sudo.

exit

Creating your DNS zone files

DNS zones are created via files in /var/named. Create a new file in there called dev.zone and fill it with this:

;
; BIND data file for dev sites
;
$TTL    604800
@       IN      SOA     dev. root.dev. (
                     2008101920         ; Serial
                         604800         ; Refresh
                          86400         ; Retry
                        2419200         ; Expire
                         604800 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
;
@       IN      NS      dev.
@       IN      A       127.0.0.1
*.dev.  14400   IN      A       127.0.0.1

Repeat the above for each TLD you want to set up, replacing ‘dev’ of course.

Configuring named.conf

Now, open /etc/named.conf. The first thing you want to do here is to show named where to get its DNS info (for the rest of the internet), i.e. forwarding servers. Let’s use OpenDNS. Add these lines in the options section of named.conf (after ‘directory “/var/named”;’):

forwarders {
    208.67.222.222;
    208.67.220.220;
};

Now, we just need to let named know about those zone files we created a minute ago. For each of the zone files, create a section like this:

zone "dev" IN {
  type master;
  file "dev.zone";
};

You’ll see where to put it. There’s a ‘localhost’ section already there. Just put yours below that.

Configuring and loading the LaunchDaemon

Okay. One last thing. Tell Mac OS X to activate named. Open the LaunchDaemon plist file for named (I had to use Textmate because Property List Editor didn’t let me save a file belonging to root.):

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.isc.named.plist

Change ‘disabled’ from true to false, and save the file.

Now, load it:

sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.isc.named.plist

If everything went well, your DNS server should be up and running, and your personalized TLDs should resolve to your local machine. Try visiting something.dev and see if it resolves correctly. You might want to comment out all those custom lines from your /etc/hosts file too.

Now for the Apache Magic!

Now that the DNS stuff is out of the way, it’s just a matter of setting that magic directive in your Apache conf file. The directive is called VirtualDocumentRoot.

I don’t know how you have your Apache configured, but personally, I like to keep all of my custom configuration in my own file (the one in /etc/apache2/users). Here is what my /etc/apache2/users/jason.conf file looks like:

DocumentRoot "/Users/jason/Sites/default/public/"

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
    VirtualDocumentRoot /Users/jason/Sites/%-1/%-2+/public
</VirtualHost>

The DocumentRoot directive is for the default site — the site that comes up when you visit http://localhost. The NameVirtualHost should be the reverse IP for your local machine. Finally, the VirtualDocumentRoot is an interpolated path for finding your sites. ‘%-1’ means the last part of the domain name (the TLD). ‘%-2+’ means everything before that. So, http://example.dev/ would load files from /Users/jason/Sites/dev/example/public. If you want a different scheme, read more about directory name interpolation on Apache’s web site.

Now, restart Apache!

sudo apachectl graceful

You should be good to go!

Please let me know your thoughts and corrections in the comments.

Update – 28 Oct, 2008

As Brian Toth mentioned in the comments, it’s probably also necessary to add 127.0.0.1 in your DNS settings in the Network System Pref pane.

Apache, BIND, DNS, Mac

And the ensuing discussion…

1

Oct 22nd, 2008 at 1:36 pm Beau

I did a similar thing with my company’s DNS so that all the machines plugged into the LAN can access all of the development sites as domain.dev.

I like your folder hierarchy by TLD setup though compared to the Ubuntu one conf per site for Apache.

One problem to think about in the future is naming collisions when they open up TLD’s (*.dev, *.mycompany, *.whatever) for anyone to purchase/register.
2

Oct 22nd, 2008 at 1:40 pm Bradford C.
What about custom log locations? Do those work using the wildcards used in the VirtualDocumentRoot directive?

For example:
```
 VirtualDocumentRoot /Users/useraccount/Sites/%-1/%-2+/public
 ErrorLog "/private/var/log/apache2/%-2+.%-1-error_log"
```
I’ll give this a shot when I have more time, but just wondering if you or anyone might know the answer to this.
3

Oct 22nd, 2008 at 3:09 pm Jason Johnson

@Bradford- According to the Apache site:

The main disadvantage is that you cannot have a different log file for each virtual host; however if you have very many virtual hosts then doing this is dubious anyway because it eats file descriptors. It is better to log to a pipe or a fifo and arrange for the process at the other end to distribute the logs to the customers (it can also accumulate statistics, etc.).

So, that might not work. I rarely have a need for separate log files on my development machine, but if you do, you might want to look into the pipe option.
4

Oct 22nd, 2008 at 4:02 pm Oliver

I’m deeply impressed: simple, elegant, easy. I wish I’d known about this a long time ago!

Is there a similarly simple way to create subdomains?
5

Oct 22nd, 2008 at 4:12 pm Oliver

Oh dear. It would appear I can’t read.
6

Oct 22nd, 2008 at 5:04 pm Brian Toth

Great tip, thanks!

I had to add 127.0.0.1 (instead of my router) as my DNS server in my network preferences before the domains would resolve.
7

Oct 22nd, 2008 at 5:33 pm Adam Norwood

Wow, that’s awesome! That just took my vhost config file from 120+ lines down to a fixed 10! I love blog posts like these, thanks for sharing the discovery.

I sidestepped the whole BIND thing though, because I’m happy enough adding new dev sites to my HOSTS file by hand, and don’t feel like fiddling around with named. I just set my VirtualDocumentRoot to /www/%0 and now I can point to arbitrary names and have Apache figure out the correct directory. Not fully-automated and elegant as your solution, but it’s still much easier than the “old way”.
8

Oct 22nd, 2008 at 10:34 pm Trey Piepmeier
I got it to work, but I did need to add this to my Apache config (which is /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf):
```
Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI -MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
```
9

Oct 22nd, 2008 at 10:35 pm Trey Piepmeier

Well, that didn’t quite work. You get the idea, though.
10

Oct 22nd, 2008 at 10:43 pm Trey Piepmeier

Now I take that back—I’m not able to get this to work without having a line in the hosts file for every VirtualHost. I wonder what I’m doing wrong?
11

Oct 23rd, 2008 at 12:22 am jimeh

Awesome tip :)

I’ve just spent the last 2 hours reorganizing my ~/Sites folder.

I did a few things differently tho. I put all the sites and projects in ~/Sites/domains/ and then created ~/Sites/dev, wrk, and tmp. Within the dev, wrk, and tmp folders i created symlinks to the folders in question in ~/Sites/domains.

Also, some of my local development sites needs to be accessible from the rest of the internet for other members or projects and such. For that, I created a zone file called “local.mydomain.com.zone”, and I simply replaced “dev” within the file with “local.mydomain.com”. After which I created ~/Sites/com/ and within symlinks named “project.local.mydomain”.

Once done, I could use http://project.local.mydomain.com/ to access the project locally, and paste the URL to other project members and they’d also see my local dev site. This is accomplished by configuring the DNS on my host. I’ve created a CNAME DNS entry for *.local.mydomain.com which goes to the DynDNS domain I use for my laptop.

P.S. Please excuse the sloppy explanations here, it’s 8:21am, and I’ve soon been up for 24 hours… lol
12

Oct 23rd, 2008 at 1:04 am jimeh
Also, for two reasons I had to configure the Virtual Hosts a bit differently too.

The first is that I already had a bunch of virtual hosts which I wanted to keep. Like http://mysql/ being PHPMyAdmin for example.

The second was that I wanted people outside of my machine to access the dynamic hosts (see my above comment).

Hence my virtual hosts config looks like this:

NameVirtualHost *:80 NameVirtualHost *:3000 NameVirtualHost *:8080
```
VirtualDocumentRoot "/Users/jim/Sites/%-1/%-2+/public"


ServerName localhost
DocumentRoot "/Users/jim/Sites/_public"


ServerName mysql
DocumentRoot "/Users/jim/Sites/_public/mysql"
```
I’m not a virtual host expert or anything tho, all I know is that this works perfectly for what I wanted it to do.
13

Oct 25th, 2008 at 8:26 am johnw

Great tip.

Followed the instructions verbatim to a T (had to because I’m a bit of a novice with this sort of thing) and it works perfectly — save for the fact that I can’t access my dev sites when I’m offline, as I frequently am.

I plugged in 127.0.0.1 into my System Preferences->Network->Ethernet->DNS but that didn’t seem to work.

In other words, when I’m not on a network although nslookup resolves “sandbox.dev” to 127.0.0.1 but I am unable to view my sites using http://sandbox.dev/ for instance.

Any ideas on how I can tweak my settings so I can view my dev sites when I’m offline?
14

Oct 26th, 2008 at 9:51 am Technikwürze » Technikwürze 120 - Barcamp und Politikerunsinn

[…] A smarter MAMP – MAMP selbst machen auf dem Mac, von Jason T Johnson […]
15

Nov 4th, 2008 at 11:04 am Kent

Hey man- I met you awhile back on TTU’s campus. I’m in a band named Ribbonpigeon from Murfreesboro.

I had a question for you but I can’t find any email on this blog to send it to you.

Holla at me when you get a chance: kenteugene@gmail.com

-Kent
16

Nov 4th, 2008 at 2:21 pm Jason Johnson

@johnw - Good question. I’m not sure. I’ll post an update if I figure anything out.
17

Nov 14th, 2008 at 11:22 pm Bradford C

Have you been able to get this working with rails apps? Is there any specific configuration required? I was able to see the default rails-generated homepage but controllers created wouldn’t display. I didn’t do anything special to try getting this to work, but figured it’s worth asking.
18

Nov 15th, 2008 at 2:45 pm Jason Johnson

@bradford - With a Rails app, you need more than just Apache. I use Mongrel or Thin for development. In which case, you won’t be going through Apache at all. So, none of the above article will actually apply. You’ll be accessing the app server via your IP address on a different port (usually 3000).

I suppose you could use the Apache/BIND scenario with Passenger, but I haven’t tried that.
19

Nov 20th, 2008 at 8:55 am Set up virtual hosts for MAMP | fourwhitefeet

[…] change infrequently, but quickly becomes a hassle to manage if you have many. The method posted on postmodern.com may be an option. It did not work for me. I am now using MAMP PRO, which I’ll write a little […]
20

Dec 9th, 2008 at 6:08 am Chris

Is there a way to get the BIND part working with changing network locations and DHCP? I use my MB Pro in different environments (i.E. at work/home, while commuting using 3G and within the local networks of different clients). This means of course that I can’t simply add static forwarders in named.conf. Any suggestions?

Chris
21

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