What this is all about is I wanted to use PHP to do server side includes so I didn’t have to update as many files when I make changes to my client’s sites, but I wanted to preview the pages while I worked on them.  The best solution was to preview the files through the Sites folder on my Mac by steering my browser to http://127.0.0.1/.  The Mac is now my test server!

It wasn’t working at first, though.  I had to look up some tutorials on the subject to find out how to edit the appropriate configuration files.  I went one step further and installed Webmin so I can spend less time manually editing configuration, which are annoying because they’re hidden files in hidden folders so unless I want to force Finder to show hidden files, I have to use Terminal to open the file.

On top of all that work I had somehow broken my web sharing without realizing it.  I did a port scan and found Privoxy answering port 80 instead of apached.  For the life of me I don’t know how that got there.  Once that was gone, port 80 was closed even though System Preferences showed it still open.  I checked console logs and discovered that somehow I’d lost the directory apached was trying to save log files to.  I also had no configuration file (there used to be a default one) for my user account.

When all was said and done I got it working and the whole experience has given me a better idea of how web servers work.  It was actually kind of fun.