Today’s Tuesday Mac Tip is about something I enourage all Geeks to do at one point and time. And Macs are great at it, so without further ado:

Mac OS X comes ready to do web serving right out of the box
with Apache, the Internet’s most popular, stable and feature rich web
server. Setup takes just a few minutes.

First you need to enable web sharing on the computer. To enable web sharing, do the following:

Login to your Mac with an account that has admin privileges.
Select Apple -> System Preferences

Click the Sharing icon

Click the Lock icon and enter your password if necessary
Click the Start button under Web Sharing Off. This will start the web server.

Close all open windows
Open your web browser

For the Address (URL) type: http://localhost/
You should now see an Apache web page load in your browser.

You can now serve web pages for the machine as a whole and also for individual users.

Web Serving for the Machine

Store your HTML files in /LibraryWebServer/Documents.
Access your page in your web browser by enterying http://localhost/
or http://youripaddress/ for the address (URL). Use the IP address
method for remotely accessing your pages from across the Internet.
(Note: Replace “youripaddress” with your actual IP address.)

Web Serving for Individual Users

Store your HTML files in ~/Site (~ is your home directory)
Access your pages by entering http://localhost/~joeuser or
http://youripaddress/~joeuser/
(Note: You actually type the ~ here, not like above. Replace “joeuser”
with your Mac OS X login account username and “youripaddress” with your
actual IP address. See below.)

How to Find Your IP Address To Access Your Site Remotely

Selet Apple -> System Preferences

Click the Network icon

If you are connecting to the Internet with with a modem select
Internal Modem from the Configure popup menu. If you are using an
ethernet card with a cable modem, select Built-in Ethernet from the
Configure popup menu. If you are connected via another method, choose
the appropriate option for your network setup.
Note your IP Address on the left hand side of the screen.
Open your browser window
For the Address (URL) type: http:theipaddressyoujustlookedup

You should see the page load.

Note: Most users with dial up/dsl/cable connections to the Internet have
dynamic IP addresses. What that means is that each time you connect
your Internet Service Provider (ISP) gives you a different IP address.
So for someone to access your web site you would have to tell them your
IP address each time you logged onto the Internet. Not very practical!
To solve this problem you can contact your ISP and request a “static IP
address”. They might charge you a bit more per month, but you would
then be able to host a site on your local machine. Of course, if you
don’t want to pay the extra money, or don’t want you computer connected
to the Internet all the time, you could register a domain name and pay
someone to host your site for you. Then you could use your local web
server when you are building and testing your site before you transfer
it to your web hosting provider’s server.

Well that will about do it, good luck in your webserving adventures and as always you can email me or post it in the forums-

-b