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?

  1. 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.
  2. Run apachectl -t -D DUMP_INCLUDES and check if the new config file is loaded (should be /etc/apache2/other/+php-osx.conf)
  3. 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.

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