jBoxer

Early on at Cisco, I realized that it’s really beneficial to write down (step by step) what I’ve done when I install something new. It forces me to think about what I’m doing, it provides me with a guide in case I mess up and have to start over, and other people can benefit from it later.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to document my installation of MySQL on Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). Hopefully, someone will get some use out of it, but if not, at least I’ll have documentation of what I did.

The PATH Variable

MySQL has a bunch of useful executables that aren’t in PATH by default. I could symlink to them, but I think that’s less maintainable than just appending to PATH.

1. Open the Terminal
2. Open up the .bash_profile file in your home directory. This is a bash script that runs every time you start the Terminal, so the PATH variable will be extended properly every time. If you have TextMate and its UNIX command line tools installed, do it like this:

   mate ~/.bash_profile

   Otherwise, do it like this:

   /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit ~/.bash_profile &

   If you use the second one, make sure to add the ampersand at the end.

3. We want to add MySQL’s bin folder to PATH. MySQL’s going to be installed at /usr/local/mysql, so let’s add /usr/local/mysql/bin to PATH. Add the following line to .bash_profile:

   export PATH="/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"

   This replaces PATH with two new locations and the old value of path (so essentially, appending the two new locations to the beginning of PATH). You’ll notice that, in addition to /usr/local/mysql/bin (which I mentioned earlier), I also added /usr/local/sbin. OS X doesn’t include this in PATH by default, but I think it should, so I added it. I have no defense for that position, but this is as much a guide for myself as it is a guide for other people, so I don’t need to defend it :)

4. Save the updated .bash_profile and close it.
5. Quit and reopen Terminal so that .bash_profile will be rerun (you could also run it explicitly, but I prefer quitting and reopening).
6. Run the following command:

   echo $PATH

   You should see /usr/local/mysql/bin and /usr/local/sbin in there now.

7. Edit: Restart your computer. My installation worked without doing this, but Jon (in the comments) said he needed to do this before it worked, so you might as well.

Downloading + Installing

I might try compiling and installing from source at some point, but I don’t see any reason to when there are official OS X binaries available. Worst case scenario, it messes with a bunch of my settings, and I’ll uninstall and then do it from source.

1. Go to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html#downloads
2. Scroll down to the Mac OS X section (near the bottom). Download the version labeled “Mac OS X 10.5 (x86_64)”. It’s very important that you download the 64-bit version. The 32-bit one will give you preference pane problems (I call them PPPs whenever I talk about them, though this is the first time I ever have). Eventually, there’ll probably be a Mac OS X 10.6 version, but for now, this works perfectly.
3. Open the .dmg, then run mysql-x.x.xx-osx10.5-x86_64.pkg. Continue through all the screens without changing anything, until it finishes.
4. Optional: install the preference pane by running MySQL.prefPane.
5. Optional: make MySQL start up along with OS X by running MySQLStartupItem.pkg. I didn’t do this (I often use my computer for things other than development, and I don’t want to bog it down unnecessarily), so I can’t provide any instruction or vouch for how well it works on Snow Leopard.

You should now be able to start MySQL by going into the MySQL preference pane and clicking “Start MySQL Server”. If it doesn’t work, leave me a comment, and I’ll try to help you.

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I’ve been actively learning and using Django since August 2008, and I’ve loved almost every bit of it. There are plenty of places to read all about the virtues of Django, so I’ll leave that out for now.

One thing that’s always bugged me about web development in general is the sending of emails. I do development on my local computer (with a badly set up Apache / MySQL / PHP / Python / whatever else stack), and I’ve never felt like dealing with the headache of setting up a mail server. This means, when I add something that’s supposed to send an email (like an activation email after registration), I have to get very hacky to test and debug it (making sure the email text is being produced correctly, making sure it’s being sent to and from the right people, etc.).

This was one of the few web development pains that I thought Django didn’t solve. Whenever I’d test a bit of code that was supposed to send email, I’d get a “Connection refused” error page (meaning my computer has no mail server to send the email with). I would usually add in a bit of printf debugging to make sure the subject and body had the correct text, but beyond that, I’d usually wait to test the email portions until I uploaded to a server that could send email (usually the production server, unfortunately).

Yesterday, I bumped into a little section in the Django documentation that explains how to get around this. As usual, Python has all the solutions. First, set this code in your settings.py file:

EMAIL_HOST = 'localhost'
EMAIL_PORT = 1025 # replace this with some free port number on your machine

Then, assuming you’re on a Unix system (I’m on a Mac), run the following on the command line to start a “dumb” Python mailserver:

python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025

Make sure to replace 1025 with whatever you filled in for EMAIL_PORT.

Now, try running the email-sending code in your Python application. Voila! No error pages (or at least, none related to email), and the full text of the email (headers and all) appears in whatever command line prompt you ran the dumb mailserver on. This allows you to the see senders, recipients, subject, and body of the email being sent out, all without getting hacky or sending to an email account you own.

Taking this a step further, I created a small bash script called “dumbmail” in /usr/local/bin that looks like the following:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [ -z $1 ]
then port=1025
else port=$1
fi

echo "Starting dumb mail server on localhost:$port"
python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:$port

Now, when I’m testing a Django application and I get to a section that is going to send an email, I just run “dumbmail” (or “dumbmail some_number” if I need to use a different port, for some reason I can’t imagine), and I’m ready to go.

Hope this helps people. The documentation was always there – I just never noticed that part until yesterday.

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