Once I got a production push out of the way at work, I set about recreating my PHP development environment. Currently I was running PHP 5.3.0 with Apache2 and Postgresql 8.4, all installed via MacPorts. Why the time for a change? Two reasons. The first one is my desire to constantly tinker and tweak my environment. The second reason was to test out some things for future work projects.

Those who follow the blog know that I had successfully convinced The Powers That Be at work to use Zend Framework to build out future PHP projects. I also decided that it would be good to examine if Zend Server Community Issue is a viable stack for us. In order to make that decision, I needed to install it and check it out.

Being the cutting-edge guy that I am, I installed the beta version that comes with PHP 5.3. I remember that I was having problems getting ZSCE working on Snow Leopard, but those problems seem to have disappeared. Flawless install, and with about 10 minutes of work tweaking Apache configuration files I had my new PHP stack back.

I have to admit that to a jaded "I am sick of personally compiling my stack" person that I am acting like these days, the control panel for Zend Server is nice. Point and click to add whatever extensions I need. No more recompiling! Perfect. After playing with this, next week I will be installing it on our dev server at work. MySQL is totally busticated for some reason, so wiping things clean and starting over with the Zend-provided version will be a welcome thing. It will allow me to actually test some things front-to-back on the dev server. Apathy towards your program's environment is a killer, so this will help me tighten things up.

So, with that out of the way the next step was figuring out what to do about Postgres. Luckily this part was *really* easy. I did a pg_dump of the entire database server and went and installed the version of Postgresql for OS-X that EnterpriseDB has. Again, a flawless install and I was up and running in no time. Created my desired users, and imported my database. Again, it took about 10 minutes.

Other than the required tweak to my php.ini to declare the timezone for the server (I got this humungous warning in CodeIgniter about it) it was smooth sailing. So now I had Apache 2, PHP 5.3, MySQL and Postgresql, all detached from MacPorts. Next step was to remove MacPorts itself and I was good to go.

MacPorts, it was fun, but I've learned to get by without you.