Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Installing ImageMagick and imagick via MacPorts

Published on March 27, 2009 in articles by Eric Marden. 9 Comments Tags: development, howto, imagemagick, imagick, pecl, PHP, software.

Installing ImageMagick with MacPorts couldn’t be easier:

sudo port install ImageMagick

But getting it to work with your PHP installation is a bit harder. If you’ve installed PHP via MacPorts with the pear variant you can install the imagick extension via pecl:

sudo pecl install imagick

The trick to getting it to stop complaining about the Wand-config path, is by passing it the proper prefix for ImageMagick. When prompted, hit 1, then enter in:
/opt/local

Now just add this to the end of your php.ini file, and reboot apache:

[imagemagick] extension=imagick.so

Installing Sphinx on OS X for PHP

Published on March 12, 2009 in articles by Eric Marden. 7 Comments Tags: development, howto, pecl, PHP, search, software, sphinx.

I’m starting to use sphinx in my work, and wanted to get a solid development environment set up for it on my local OS X server. Since I built my local server with Mac Ports, it was actually pretty easy to get that installed:

sudo port install sphinx

However, I had trouble setting up the PHP extension for the Sphinx API. I could have used the sphinxapi.php that ships with the sphinx source code, but having a compiled extension is faster, and I don’t have to add more files to my php project. Installing Sphinx via Mac Ports didn’t help either, because it doesn’t install libsphinxclient, which is required to build the PHP Extension. That was until I found some instructions from someone doing something similar for Ruby.

Continue reading ‘Installing Sphinx on OS X for PHP’

Redirect all traffic to a new site with Apache .htaccess

Published on March 10, 2009 in articles by Eric Marden. 0 Comments Tags: apache htaccess redirect.

The easiest way to redirect all traffic from an old site to a new site is to use mod_rewrite with Apache in your .htaccess file. If this file does not already exist in the root of your site’s public folder, then go ahead and create it with a text editor. I suggest using vim.

Then pop this into it:
RewriteEngine On RewriteRule (.*) http://new.example.com/$1 [L]

The above recipe has the added benefit of also appending the page the user was requesting to the end, so if the new site is a clone of the old site then this will ensure that your users get the page that they requested. There are easier ways to do this if you are just changing URLs out and the site will be on the same server, but this is the easiest way to redirect all traffic if the new site is on a different box all together.