How to install Apache, PHP, MySQL, MongoDB and a whole bunch of other useful packages on Mac OS X 10.6

You already have a copy of Apache and PHP and that's good enough for our purposes, but you're going to need a few things that don't come bundled with your Mac. For that you need to...

Set up a LAMP stack on OS X after the jump.

You'll be needing this:

apt-get --reinstall install apache2 php5-mysql \
libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server

(You're welcome)

This blog post is just for me, so I can look it up later... I suppose you can borrow it if you find it useful :)

Using dynamic strings inside a regex can be annoying, especially if you can't guarantee that the strings are actually sane. Including a URL in a regular expression is downright obnoxious, since URLs and regular expressions share most of the same special characters, but they mean entirely different things. I threw this function together to make strings regexable. Enjoy.

Function

/**
 * Prepare a string for use in a regular expression.
 * 
 * @author Justin Hileman {@link http://justinhileman.com}
 * @access public
 * @param string $str
 * @return string
 */
function preg_real_escape_string($str) {
    $replace = array('\\' => '\\\\', '^' => '\^', '.' => '\.',
        '$' => '\$', '|' => '\|', '(' => '\(', ')' => '\)',
        '[' => '\[', ']' => '\]', '*' => '\*', '+' => '\+',
        '?' => '\?', '{' => '\{', '}' => '\}', ',' => '\,');
    return strtr($str, $replace);
}

Yeah, the name is a bit weird. This function is an analog to mysql_real_escape_string(), so it seemed fitting.

Usage

// basic usage (this is actually exactly the case I wrote this function for).
$regex = '/^' . preg_real_escape_string($name) . '/i';
$nameless = preg_replace($regex, '', $something_starting_with_name);
 
// trying to find a URL via regex can be especially obnoxious.
$regex = '/' . preg_real_escape_string($my_url) . '/';
$some_text = preg_replace($regex, '<a href="$1">$1</a>', $some_text);