I plan to create Drupal video tutorials in the near future. Although I use a Mac as my primary development box, I have Adobe Captivate installed on my Windows PC. So I installed Drupal on my PC and I ran into problems that required Apache configuration changes.

index of/

The Problem: When I clicked on the ‘Administer’ link on my site’s home page, ‘index of/‘ and a list of my site files and directories displayed instead of the administration page. In fact, any page that I attempted to go to resulted in this ‘index of/’ display.

The Solution: I opened the Apache configuration file (httpd.conf) and found that the Allowoverride for .htaccess files was set to None. I set Allowoverride to All and restarted Apache.

Clean URLs

The Problem: I always enable Clean URLs, but for some reason, I was unable to on my PC.

The Solution: I again opened my httpd.conf file and found that Apache’s mod_rewrite module was not enabled (this must be enabled in order to use Clean URLs). So I uncommented the line that loads the module and restarted Apache.

Now Drupal is running perfectly on my PC. I was a bit surprised that I had not configured Apache prior to this, but I guess that I use my Mac (and Ubuntu) so much that I never found the need. Enjoy.

After installing CakePHP on my Ubuntu box, I viewed the default home page in my browser and noticed that the page was not styled. Cake did not know the path to the CSS file because I had not enabled mod_rewrite. Although I could opt to setup CakePHP to work without mod_rewrite, I decided to enable it.

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I’ve developed in the Windows environment for most of my career.  About 4-5 years ago I began to migrate to the Mac. Now my Mac is my primary computer.

I recently worked on a project where the target OS is linux, so I installed Ubuntu 9.04 desktop on an old PC. The following are the steps I took to create a web development box. This post assumes that you have already installed Ubuntu. Click here or here for installation instructions.

After you have installed ubuntu, you may want to select/download a theme for your box. Click Install Instructions to learn how to install gnome themes.

First, I will set up LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and phpMyAdmin. AMP is my default web development environment, regardless of OS.

Next, I will install Python, Django, PostgreSQL, phppgadmin, and pgAdmin (needed for my new project).  I will also install Aptana Studio and Java (need JRE to run Aptana). I have been using Aptana Studio on my Mac for over a year, and it has become my default development IDE.

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