Transitioning your local server to Mavericks

Is your local dev environment not working after upgrading to OS X 10.9?

I recently upgraded my Mac to OS X 10.9 or Mavericks to experience all the wonders of the latest OS. After the excitement of having multiple tabs in my Finder window and debating whether or not to switch back to Chrom from Safari again, I got back to work.

This is when it dawned on me that my local development environment might have changed. Fortunately, you don’t need to setup your local environment again after upgrading. You will need to edit you httpd.conf file located at:

/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

This file has been replaced with the standard configurations. Mavericks saves your old file though. It can be located at:

/etc/apache2/httpd.conf.pre-updated

If you use a diff tool for version control, you can easily compare the two files. I had to uncomment a couple of lines related to PHP, Perl, and my Virtual Host. The last one, regarding my Virtual Host, was the reason I got ‘It works!’ when trying to access my local dev sites. Here are the lines I uncommented:

LoadModule perl_module libexec/apache2/mod_perl.so
LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf