Since my recent move to the Mac running OS X I have learnt some new stuff about PHP and Apache the hard way. OS X is shipped with Apache and PHP by default and if you compile Apache and PHP like you normally do under Linux you quickly get surprised. When I compile Apache I always use a prefix so I have it installed under /usr/local/apache or something like that. I like to have it installed like this so I can quickly change between Apache and PHP versions and configurations. Under OS X you quickly notice that Apache is not completely installed in the directory you added as prefix. The reason for that is that Apache has a different installation layout under OS X. So, you simply have to use the configure parameter --with-layout to make things work like you are used to.

The compilation switches I use are:

cd apache_1.3.34
make clean
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache \
                    --enable-module=so \
                    --enable-module=rewrite \
                    --with-layout=Apache
make
sudo make install
cd ..
cd php-4.4.2
make clean
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache  \
            --enable-mbstring \
            --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs \
            --enable-cli \
            --enable-exif \
            --with-mysql \
            --with-mbstring
make
sudo make install