Symbolic Links and Apache on OS X

TL;DR

Create a link to your development environment in your web server path.

1. Create the link

sudo ln -s /Users/bciuca/dev/MyTestApp/ /Library/WebServer/Documents/testapp

1. Set directory permissions

chmod o+x ~/dev/MyTestApp

Background

I have a webapp project that I need to run in a browser locally on my develoment machine. My options to test the webapp is to either set my apache config to point to my development dir, or make a build sctipt to copy and paste the code to a test path in my existing web server root.

Symbolic Links

In this example, I am testing everything locally with no need for minification or other build steps before hosting the code. For simplicity, a symbolic link in the web server root will point to my development directory, /Users/bciuca/dev/MyTestApp.

The ln -s command will create the symbolic link, given a source and destination path (sudo is needed to write the symlink).

sudo ln -s /Users/bciuca/dev/MyTestApp/ /Library/WebServer/Documents/testapp

So the URL http://localhost/testapp is now serving files from /Users/bciuca/dev/MyTestApp/.

Further reading on symbolic and hard links in OS X.

In order for Apache to serve the files, you must set the correct file permissions listed above in the Procedure step 2.