Setting up wordpress on snowleopard

I have been configuring a local site to do wordpress dev on snow leopard. I ran into problems when trying to configure the url rewriting. I found a great post however it didn’t quite get it working so here is what I had to do.

1. change the httpd.conf file. This is located in etc/apache2/httpd.conf open it in something like nano

   sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

   Find the section that looks like this

   <Directory />
       Options FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride None
       Order deny,allow
       Deny from all
   </Directory>

   and change the AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All

2. Next up we need to change the conf file for the user that requires .htaccess. This is done by navigating to /etc/apache2/users/ and finding the file username.conf. This needs to be edited in something like nano again to look like this:

   <Directory "/Users/maxgarfinkel/Sites/">
       Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride All
       Order allow,deny
       Allow from all
   </Directory>
   

   It was the lack of FollowSymLinks that caused me to get Forbidden errors on the site.

3. Finally we need to create the .htaccess file in the sites folder and if you want wordpress to be able to write to it you should make it writeable by every one. This is bad so only do it on machine not exposed to the world! The command for that is

   chmod 666

   If anyone knows the safe permissions to allow wordpress to write to the .htaccess but not any tom dick or harry, lemme know!