Artur Ejsmont has a recent post to his blog showing how to get a MongoDB PECL extension to compile in a 32bit OSX environment (Snow Leopard).

Here is a quick step by step guide on how to get mongodb and PHP5.2 mongo pecl extension going on your MacOSX in 32bit mode! NOTE: 32 bit mongodb binaries have 2GB address space limit so you wont be able to process too much on your laptop. You will still be able to code and connect to remote instances just fine.

His process includes five steps - well, eight if you count the optional "install MongoDB" ones too - complete with the commands you'll need to get things compiled, ready for copy and paste. You can find the MongoDB PECL package here.

In this recent post to his blog Stefan Koopmanschap shares some of the troubles (and a solution) when he was dealing with getting the Geoip PECL extension installed on his Zend Server setup in OSX.

Today I needed to get a client application up and running on my local system. This application uses the Geoip PECL package, so I needed to get this up and running. This turned out to be slightly more difficult than just a PECL install, as you're missing some libraries by default, so here is my log of things to do to get it up and running.

He gives the complete list of steps his followed including downloading the source and his way around this "System could not load this extension" issue. The trick was to recompile the source with the correct architecture. By default his extension was built with i386 instead of 64-bit but updating some of the CFLAGS settings (and a few other environment variables) got things compiling correctly.

Ralph Schindler has a new post to his blog today detailing the process you'll need to compile Gearman (or just about anything) on a Zend Server CE install on Snow Leopard.

Zend Server CE for Mac (as of this writing), comes compiled as an i386 executable only. This includes the PHP binary, php library, and apache binaries that come shipped with ZSCE. While ZSCE works great out the box with all the provided extensions, you might find that you want some additional 3rd party PHP extensions compiled/linked into this stack. That's where things get a little confusing, and in this post, we'll look at how to install the gearman extension.

He give two methods - the easy way where you can export a CFLAGS setting to compile with multiple architectures or the harder way (that works for Gearman), building static libraries. The full list of commands (and some example output) is included in the post. In the comments there's also an example of the install if you're using Macports.

Chance Garcia has a recent post to his blog showing how he fixed an issue with his MAMP install involving development of a SSH wrapper he developed and some testing out of PHPStorm and PHPUnit.

One thing I can say is that, even though I use a convenient app like MAMP PRO to set up my local development environment, I'm glad my sysadmin-fu is up to snuff enough to fly without the conveniences because after this ordeal, I feel like I might as well have made my MAMP stack from scratch with all the hoops I jumped tonight.

He shares a few of the things he discovered along the way like: the location of MAMP's "pecl" command, an error caused by a bad pear.conf file, doing custom compiles of PHP and libssh as a fallback and getting the extension to work in the CLI PHP version too.

In a recent post to his blog Mark Hamlin talks about some of his difficulties in getting XDebug and Netbeans working together from an OSX machine hitting a Ubuntu server.

For the past 18 months working with PHP, i've primarily used alternatives, not out of preference, but because netbeans xdebug integration consistently failed me. It would (might) work with a remote apache, but would not play with scripts executed remotely from the command line. I could be fairly sure my xdebug config was sound as I no problems with MacGDB and PHPStorm whatsoever.

With a little more investigation, he discovered that it was the OSX firewall causing issues. He found that, with a new incoming connection came a confirmation box to approve the connection. This, of course, wasn't passed along to Netbeans so he never saw it. In the end, he set up a reverse SSH tunnel to bypass the firewall completely (command included).

In this recent post to Reddit, a question is asked that's an issue for many developers testing the email sending abilities of their applications - how can it be tested effectively without outside services flagging you as a possible spammer.

So how do you guys do it? My current solution is to just output the email template HTML straight to the browser, but this doesn't always work. [...] I have considered sending emails through to my GMail, but I run my tests quite often and I'm not sure Google would be too happy with the amount I send. [...] I'm sure there's a better way I can handle this without modifying my code too much. Suggestions appreciated.

Suggestions from the comments include:

• a local SMTP/IMAP server configured to catch all emails being sent
• Changing the address based on an environment flag
• Using "@example.com"
• Saving the email as a .msg file for later review

There's also suggestions of other Mac or Windows software to mimic the mail server like smtp4dev and MockStmp

Bertrand Mansion has a recent post to his blog looking at repairing missing functionality in the latest OS X update (Lion) with the intl extension and gettext (not installed by default).

Mac OSX Lion ships with PHP 5.3.6. [...] These are all very good solutions, but since I prefer to travel light and the version in Lion already comes with a lot of useful extensions, I preferred to go with it.

He shows how to update the default Lion PHP install to include some of the things he needed for his development including:

• setting up the php.ini file
• installing PEAR/PECL
• installing the intl extension
• and a hack to get gettext working (renaming a base function)

Rob Allen has posted his own guide to getting PHP 5.3 set up on OS X 10.7 Lion, the just-released update for Apple's operating system. It comes with a bundled set of PHP-related tools but you might want to set them up your own way. This is where the guide comes in.

With OS X 10.7, Apple continues to ship PHP 5.3 with PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL out of the box. This is how to set it up from a clean install of 10.7.

He goes through each of the pieces of software and talks about where to download the latest from and what configuration steps are needed:

• MySQL
• Apache
• the php.ini
• Xdebug
• PEAR
• PHPUnit (and friends)
• PECL OAuth
• mcrypt

Alex Simonenko has a new post to his blog talking about what he had to do to get PHP 5.3.6 working on his OS X Lion installation since a previous method no longer worked. in his new post he shares his solution - using Homebrew. (Note: original post is in Russian)

After installing OS X Lion (10.7) was faced with an unpleasant problem, install PHP + MySQL bundle as I did before does not work. And as it turned out, the problem is in MySQL, source code is not yet ready for the new OS from Apple. After some thought and reading similar problems on the Internet, I found [a solution to the problem].

He includes the commands you'll need to get Homebrew installed and configured to install a fresh download of the archive (dmg) after a few setup changes. He uses Homebrew to install a few dependencies the installation will need and his example configure options for the build. Then the install is just a "make" and "make install" away.

On the Liip blog today Christian Stocker talks about a one-line installer that's been developed to get PHP 5.3 up and working on an OS X 10.6 platform without much hassle. The tool updates everything needed to get a bit more robust version of the language installed and ready for use.

Apple computers and OS X are quite common here at Liip (and local.ch) as developer machines. But while OS X comes with a not-too-old PHP installation, it nevertheless doesn't have everything we need (for example the infamous intl extension) and it's not that easily extendable with self-compiled extensions. [...] Our friends at local.ch took this very dissatisfying situation in their own hands, forked the build-entropy-php script from Marc Liyanage's great entropy work, extended and adjusted it to their (and our) needs.

If you'd like to try out the package on your own systems, you can find it and the full instructions for its use at http://php-osx.liip.ch/. He also points out the actual build part of the process (build-entropy-php) as well as the packager you'll need for it to grab the library updates it needs.