OS X

Here's a quick tip for people using Mac OS X and like an easy way to install and maintain drush, our beloved Drupal command line tool.

Seems like Homebrew, the so called "missing package manager for OS X", has a Formula (read: package) for Drush. This means that using Homebrew you can install Drush on your Mac using one command:

brew install drush

If you don't know what Homebrew is or does: it's a package manager for OS X which allows you to easily install extra (UNIX) software like drush, solr, wget, varnish on your machine. Kind of what apt-get does on Ubuntu or yum does on CentOS. It's a recently developed alternative to Fink and Macports.

To connect to external SVN servers behind an HTTP proxy, you have to configure subversion to connect over the proxy. This can be done using the servers file in the .subversion folder in your home folder (~/.subversion/servers).

There's quite a few information available on how to install Apache Solr for your Drupal website. One of the best places to start is the Apache Solr Search Integration module documentation page. In this post I will gather all the bits and pieces for installing Solr in Tomcat on one specific platform: Snow Leopard. This is the platform I'm developing Drupal sites on and the great thing is it has all the needed Java stuff built in, so it's quite easy to install Solr and Tomcat. This method might work on some other systems too having Java 1.6 (with mostly some minor adjustments) but I've not tested this.

If you get kicked out of your SSH connection once in a while, your SSH server might have set a maximum amount of time you can be idle.

To overcome this, you can use a little setting in your SSH client configuration file. You should find this file in your home directory as ~/.ssh/config. If it's not there, you should create it. Yout have to add the following line.

ServerAliveInterval 60

You have to set the number of seconds after which the connection should be issued with a dummy statement. So in this example that time is 1 minute (60 seconds).

Put the following code in your .bash_profile in your home folder.

PATH=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin:\
/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin:$PATH
export PATH