How to install mongodb and the PHP mongo driver on Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server

I wonder if I could have found a longer title for this post. Possibly, but I doubt I could come up with one more specific. Honestly installing mongodb on Mac OS X is pretty trivial if you have the MacPorts installed and getting things working with PHP is not very difficult either. What is required is a little planning before you begin.

Obviously if you do not have the MacPorts installed then that should be your first order of business and it will require the current release of Xcode. At this point let’s assume that you do have MacPorts installed and properly updated. Using the ports system will create the database staging area in /opt/local/var/db/mongo, set up the mongodb.log in /opt/local/var/log/mongodb/mongodb.log as well as create the org.macports.mongodb.plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons.

In a terminal window run the following command:

sudo port install mongodb

At this point you can begin to play around with mongo but if you want to build an application you will need to setup a bridge between your favorite language and the DB daemon. In this case I am covering PHP because in the past adding things into the stock version that is bundled with Mac OS X Server can be nothing less than tricky. Fortunately Apple included PECL on Snow Leopard(1) and above. You can check your system by opening the Terminal and typing ‘which pecl’ to reveal the path of the installed utility.

sudo pecl install mongo
...

Build process completed successfully
Installing '/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/mongo.so'
install ok: channel://pecl.php.net/mongo-1.2.6
configuration option "php_ini" is not set to php.ini location
You should add "extension=mongo.so" to php.ini

If you are still running the default configuration file then edit /etc/php.ini-defaults and resave as /etc/php.ini. Basically you need to add the following to the end of the ini file. You should also take a moment to examine the file’s timezone setting and set that as well. Simply search for [date] and enter the appropriate entry for your timezone (see note 2 below).

[mongo]
extension=mongo.so

Restart Apache and check your work. I simply drop a phpinfo() call in a know working php script and examine the output. You should see something like the following;

As you can see things are pretty straight forward to get things up and running. Now you have the basic web 2.0 tools ready at you fingertips; so get busy designing those cool applications to serve up.

(1) – I will try to verify if earlier versions had PECL installed.
(2) – date.timezone setting example

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone = 'America/New_York'

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