midtoad's blog

Mac Mini webserver

The more I use Mac OS X on my MacBook, the less I find I have the energy for dealing with all the problems and hassles of Windows and Linux. Not to say that there aren't issues with OS X, but I do find fewer. And so, for quite a while now I've been wanting to dump Mandriva Linux (and the old, noisy PC it's running on), and replace it with a small, quiet Mac Mini running OS X. Over the course of the past 24 hours, that's just what I did. You're reading this page being served up by the new server.

Since I have set up a number of web servers using Linux, I anticipated that doing the same thing in OS X would be easier, and it largely was, with one exception due to my own stupidity. More on that later. I consulted a number of articles on how to use the Mini as a server. Here are a couple:

• Nerdvittles ISP in a box (there's a ton of other useful stuff for Mac owners at this site besides the mentioned tutorial)
• Using a Mac Mini as a personal server (i.e. on your own home network)

I installed Python, Moin-Moin, MySQL, CherrPy, Frog blog, and a variety of utility programs.

Then I copied over the contents of my entire existing webserver, and tweaked the settings, since Apache stores web files in a different location in OS X than it does in in Linux.

Oh yeah, the hard part. I was unable to access my Rigid Wings wiki from outside the home network. I struggled with this for quite a while (it was too long after midnight), then realized it was due to the fact that in the moin.py config file I'd specified that the wiki should only pay attention to the localhost interface. Since I didn't just want people on localhost to be able to see the wiki, I need to change the setting to ''.