Apache configuration for SimpleSAMLphp on OS X Snow Leopard

I needed to do some testing with the SimpleSAMLphp (http://simplesamlphp.org/) application today. I’m not a php developer so my mac wasn’t setup to run php in Apache. That part was trivially simple to setup, but I ran into problems trying to get the SimpleSAMLphp application running in a configuration that made sense to me. What I wanted to do was install the application into my /Sites/ directory, and create another directory under /Sites/ that would act as the php site that uses it. It may seem odd to install the app in the sites directory, but I just wanted to keep the two together. So, the directory structure looked like this:

~/Sites/simplesamlphp/
~/Sites/phpsite/

Then, I wanted to change my Apache configuration so that http://localhost/ would remain the same (pointing at /Library/WebServer/Documents/), http://phpsite/ would point to ~/Sites/phpsite/, and http://phpsite/simplesaml would point to ~/Sites/simplesamlphp/www.

It took some trial and error, but I ended up with these configurations:

First I uncommented the following line in the /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file:

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Then I went to that file and changed the following line from this:

NameVirtualHost *:80

to this:

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80

and, added this:

<VirtualHost phpsite>
DocumentRoot "/Users/sysadmin/Sites/phpsite"
ServerName phpsite
<Directory "/Users/sysadmin/Sites/phpsite">
Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews Includes
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
Alias /simplesaml /Users/sysadmin/Sites/simplesamlphp/www
</VirtualHost>

Then I went to my /etc/hosts file and added this line:

127.0.0.1      phpsite

Then, a quick Apache restart and everything was running smoothly.

http://localhost - still points to /Library/WebServer/Documents
http://localhost/~sysadmin/ - still points to ~/Sites/
http://phpsite - points to ~/Sites/phpsite
http://phpsite/simplesaml - points to ~/Sites/simplesamlphp/www

Obviously you wouldn’t want to configure it this way if this was a production server, but when I’m doing development work like this I’d prefer to keep everything under my own home folder.