HowTo: Install services on OSX

This post is used to comment the article on how to install services on OSX that you can find at http://bitnami.com/article/how-to-install-services-on-osx

Hi there. Great programs, website, and help-blog-article thing – thanks.

I made a plist file for a MAMP stack, but when I restarted my MacBook, MySQL was not running (according to phpMyAdmin) even though Apache and PHP were.

I tried restarting, without the plist file, and then manually entering
bq. (/Applications/mampstack-0.9.4/ctlscript.sh start)
at the terminal. This worked fine – MySQL worked along with everything else.

So I think there must be something wrong with my plist file. Any thoughts?

(<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-8”?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC ”-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version="”1.0”">
<dict> <key>Label</key> <string>com.bitnami-mamp.services</string> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/Applications/mampstack-0.9.4/ctlscript.sh</string> <string>start</string> </array> <key>UserName</key> <string>root</string> <key>RunAtLoad</key> <true /> <key>OnDemand</key> <false />
</dict>
</plist>
<!- made by me, Martin, from http://bitnami.com/article/how-to-install-services-on-osx and http://bitnami.com/files/stacks/mampstack/mampstack.pdf -> )

Hi Snozboz,

I think the plist file is correct. Maybe you have installed the MAMPStack as a normal user. You need to install the MAMPStack as root user:

$ sudo ./bitnami-mampstack-*.app/Contents/MacOS/installbuilder.sh

Hi,

I also had a similar problem with the plist file. I have installed the Drupal Bitnami Stack on a Mac mini running snow leopard. Console showed that mysql was starting and stopping repeatedly. I believe I did not install the Stack as root. Is there a way to set permissions and ownership on the Stack directories so that I do not have to completely re-install the Stack?

Thank you.

Hi,

Yes, you should modify the mysql folder permissions:

$ chown -R root:mysql /mysql
$ chown -R mysql:mysql /mysql/data

Hi beltran,

Thanks for your help. I changed the permissions and loaded the plist file, and checked to see if it was loaded (it was). Then I checked console and found these messages repeated until I unload the plist file.
6/29/10 3:22:21 PM com.bitnami-drupal.services[34445] Syntax OK 6/29/10 3:22:21 PM com.bitnami-drupal.services[34445] ..../Bitnami-drupal6/apache2/scripts/ctl.sh : httpd (pid 30417) already running 6/29/10 3:22:26 PM com.bitnami-drupal.services[34456] ....../Bitnami-drupal6/mysql/scripts/ctl.sh : mysql (pid 259) already running
I understand that the servers were already running, but why would the script keep trying to start the servers over and over again?

Hi,

Not sure, maybe it is related to the KeepAlive option in the plist file: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/document…

Hi beltran,

Thank you for your reply. I used the plist file from:
http://bitnami.com/article/how-to-install-servi…

I read the manual page for launchd that you suggested in your post. The “OnDemand” option has been deprecated since OS X 10.4 in favor of “KeepAlive”. Since I am using 10.6.3, KeepAlive is what launchd is looking for. The default value for the “KeepAlive” option is false. If launchd is ignoring OnDemand, and the default option for KeepAlive is false, then the script should run only 1 time. Nonetheless, I changed OnDemand to KeepAlive in the plist file, and kept the value to false. I loaded the plist file, checked the activity monitor, logs, etc. and everything seems fine now. Thanks again for your help. I previously tried compiling everything on my own, but could not get mysql, apache and php to play nice with each other after hours and hours of recompiling and troubleshooting. The Bitnami stack was up and running in a few minutes! Sweet!

I’m glad to hear this :)