macOS Archives – Remons TechNotes

Local’s SSL “Trust” button is BROKEN on macOS. Here’s why, and here’s the fix. [A LocalWP Addon].

Click Trust next to your site’s SSL certificate in Local. Enter your admin password like a good citizen. Watch it report success. Open https://mysite.local and… “Your connection is not private”. Click Trust again. Password again. Success again. Warning again.

Insanity, as the saying goes, is clicking the same button twice and expecting different results. Or something like that.

The Problem

On modern macOS, Local’s Trust button doesn’t work. Well it does, but not for you. It shows the password prompt, appears to succeed, and changes absolutely nothing; browsers keep screaming about your .local certificate forever. And because it looks like it worked, you naturally assume the problem is elsewhere; your browser cache, your cert, your karma. It isn’t. It’s the button. Continue reading “Local’s SSL “Trust” button is BROKEN on macOS. Here’s why, and here’s the fix. [A LocalWP Addon].”

Safari bug – error pages getting zoomed

Hi all.

Yeah, I know. It’s been over a year since my last entry. I’m not the person to monetise online presence, I just post stuff about problems I faced and how I solved them. No biggie, right?

Well, for a few weeks now my error pages looked like this: Continue reading “Safari bug – error pages getting zoomed”

macOS High Sierra, the magnificent update that killed the development environment.

[UPDATED sep 26]
[UPDATED again on oct 27th, see tags UPDATE2]

macOS High Sierra is awesome~~, but unfortunately, it killed my “old style” development environment~~. It was not just High Sierra; brew upgrade also had a big part in the failing of the development setup, if not ALL of it. I brew upgraded my set-up on Sierra (not High yet) and it got F’ed up as well. My guess; 95% Brew’s fault, 5% High Sierra (and only because High Sierra sort of forced me to brew upgrade)

If you are still using the “old” way for development websites (a.k.a., using macOSs own apache2 and brew php), you might want to wait with upgrading to High Sierra; I don’t have a working solution yet.

[UPDATE2] I think I might have a solution :)

Continue reading “macOS High Sierra, the magnificent update that killed the development environment.”

SSH + TOTP – Two factor Authentication on SSH with OATH Time-based One-Time Passwords

Following the footsteps of this TechOrganic blog article but not wanting to require all the authentication factors, just the TOTP in addition to Password authentication, and also running into macOS’ System Integrity Protection, I found a way to get OTP working on OSX 10.6 through 10.11 without destroying automated access with Private+Public KeyPair. Continue reading “SSH + TOTP – Two factor Authentication on SSH with OATH Time-based One-Time Passwords”

Hey Siri, what do I need to do to get my development environment working again after upgrading to macOS Sierra?

Hello, macOS Sierra!

macOS… that name… so… long… ago…

It has been, what?, 11 years? 12? … System 9, that was the last OS to be called macOS. The name change does not change anything regarding the update cycle, although on one of my macs, the upgrade went horrifically bad! I ended up rebooting in Recovery mode and installing macOS from there.

For getting the development enviroment back up, not much to be done!

Apache could not find the default server certificates in

/private/etc/apache2/server.crt

so after correcting those paths in

/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

and restarting Apache, all’s well!

Shell commandsudo nano /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

Shell commandsudo apachectl restart

As always; feel free to comment or ask questions :)

Downgrade (or upgrade) PHP on OSX

OSX Yosemite comes with PHP 5.5. OSX Mountain Lion comes with PHP 5.3. What if you wanted to run PHP 5.4 on both? Well, you can, with a dead simple installation;

Shell commandcurl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.4

will install PHP 5.4.

Thanks to The coolest guide on the planet.

[EDIT: nov 6 2017: fixed dead link, added troubleshooting steps below]

Still not seeing the new version?

The command above should install the old PHP 5 in /usr/local/php5 (which should be user-writable) and also write a new config file in /etc/apache2/other/+php-osx.conf, so please check and see if both exist.
If you installed PHP 7.x, the folder is /usr/local/php7, of course.
Run apachectl -t -D DUMP_INCLUDES and check if the new config file is loaded (should be /etc/apache2/other/+php-osx.conf)
Try apachectl configtest and see if any errors occurred

If you can’t get it to work, try alternate methods, like using the even older series of posts on How to set-up and maintain a development environment on osx, OR (even better!) use Local by Flywheel.