Drupal Development Environment on Mac OS X 10.6 - Multisite Capable

I've begun working a lot more with Drupal multisites, as doing so saves a lot of time in certain situations (usually, when you have a large group of sites that use the same kinds of Drupal modules, but need to have separate databases and front-end information.

One problem I've finally overcome is the use of actual domain host names for development (i.e. typing in dev.example.com instead of localhost to get to a site). This is important when doing multisite work, as it lets you use Drupal's built-in multisite capabilities without having to hack your way around using the http://localhost/ url.

Here's what I did to use dev.example.com to access a dev.example.com multisite in a Drupal installation using MAMP (the dev.example.com folder is located within Drupal's /sites/ folder):

1. Edit MAMP/Apache's httpd.conf file - it's located at /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf
   1. Put in the following at the end of the file:
      

      <virtualhost>
        DocumentRoot /Applications/MAMP/htdocs
        ServerName dev.example.com
      </virtualhost>

2. Restart Apache (in MAMP, click stop servers, then start servers).
3. Open up Terminal (in Applications > Utilities), and type in $ sudo nano /private/etc/hosts
   1. Type in your password if requested
4. In the hosts file, add a new line after the line that reads 127.0.0.1 localhost:
   • 127.0.0.1 dev.example.com
5. Save the file by pressing Control+O (this writes the file) and then Return when it says 'File Name to Write:', then press Control+X to exit nano.
6. Now, flush Mac OS X's DNS cache by typing:
   • sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

Now, if you are behind a proxy server (i.e. if you have the Network settings in System Preferences set to use a proxy server for Web traffic), you will need to also add your dev.example.com entry to the 'Bypass proxies for these domains' field (localhost/127.0.0.1 should already be present here).

Next time you visit http://dev.example.com/ in your web browser, Drupal should point you to the appropriate multisite folder on your local Mac!