This tutorial assumes a certain degree of comfort in the command line Terminal for installing WordPress on Mac OS X Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion or Snow Leopard, but the commands below are not overly complex and following the tutorial will get the job done. If you have no experience with the Terminal and want the easiest way to install on your local Mac then follow this guide here which installs everything with a point and click in the Finder.
Before proceeding WordPress needs a couple of things to get going and those things are an AMP stack – Apache, MySQL and PHP, Apache and PHP come bundled in OS X but MySQL needs to be downloaded and configured. Optionally install phpmyadmin to manage the database.
To get the AMP stack working correctly on OS X follow this Mac OSX 10.10 Yosemite or OSX 10.9 Mavericks.
Once these components are in place you are OK to proceed.
OS X has 2 web document roots ‘/Library/WebServer/Documents’ and ‘/Users/username/Sites/’ also known as ‘~/Sites’ this guide uses ‘~/Sites’.
The shared WordPress directory will be called “wordpress“.
WordPress File Set Up
make a sharing directory and move into it
mkdir ~/Sites/wordpress ; cd ~/Sites/wordpress
get the latest WordPress
curl -O https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
expand it
tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz
move all files into shared directory one level up
mv wordpress/* .
remove empty directory and compressed archive
rmdir wordpress/ ; rm latest.tar.gz
create a settings file
cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
Database Setup
create it a new database (no space between -p and password – as an alternative this can be done in phpmyadmin
mysql -u [username] -p[password] -e "create database [databasename];"
or in phpmyadmin
You can do all of the above in one hit at the command line just separate the commands with “;”. This would be handy with multiple installs and can be scripted – not necessary for this guide – but I thought I’d throw it in.
mkdir ~/Sites/wordpress ; cd ~/Sites/wordpress ; curl -O http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz ; tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz ; mv wordpress/* . ; rmdir wordpress/ ; rm latest.tar.gz ; rmdir wordpress/ ; rm latest.tar.gz ; cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php ; mysql -u [username] -p[password] -e "create database [databasename];" ; nano wp-config.php
WordPress Database Config
Then proceed with the editing of the wp-config file which needs to have the database details added as below:
nano wp-config.php
// ** MySQL settings – You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress‘);
/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘root‘);
/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpassword‘);
/** MySQL hostname */
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost‘);
If you are not comfortable with editing this file in nano in the Terminal you can use Text Edit in Applications.
Famous 5 Minute Install
open it up in your default browser
open http://localhost/~username/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php
fill in your credentials:
voila
Post Mortem
OSX Yosemite 10.10
In your username.conf in /etc/apache/users/ make sure you have the following directives:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | <Directory“/Users/USERNAME/Sites/”> AllowOverride All Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks Require all granted </Directory> |
This will allow .htaccess file usage.
But wait there’s more, you need to fix up those ownership and permissions
sudo chown -R _www ~/Sites/wordpress ; sudo chmod -R g+w ~/Sites/wordpress
Or just change the Apache user to be your regular user.
Thats it you should have a fully functioning local WordPress install built on a native AMP stack.
