Note: These instructions are identical for Leopard and Snow Leopard.

The are some items you need to change in the default configuration to allow other parts of this documentation to work witouth to many problems and to keep your server a bit more secure.

You need to change the configuration file of Apache. Please edit the file ‘httpd.conf‘ in the directory ‘/etc/httpd/‘. Find the following line:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var

and change it into:

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.html.var

This will allow you to have php based index pages to appear without any problems. Next change the following lines:

User nobody
Group #-1

and change them into:

User _www
Group _www

This will run the Apache process (httpd) as a normal user on your system, the _www user hasn’t got many rights but enough to run a web-server. This makes the system more secure.

The next change is to allow the use of ‘.htaccess‘ files in your directories and virtual sites. Find the lines:

# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be “All”, “None”, or any combination of the keywords:
# Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit

Edit the line below from:

AllowOverride None

and change it into:

AllowOverride All

Next step: Configuring virtual hosts in Apache