Running activeCollab on Mac OS X

avatar spfolly Jan 27. 2010. 5:57 am #1
Hi,

We're considering using activeCollab for our projects and would host it on our OS X Server (currently 10.5, upgrading to 10.6 soon).

I'm confident it meets the system requirements, but was just wondering if anyone else has successfully done this and if there are any tips they would like to share?

Regards,
Steve
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Jan 27. 2010. 6:12 am #2
Hello Steve,

There are several customer that we know of who host activeCollab on Mac OS X Server. activeCollab itself is developed on Macs and we had a number of development installations on it since Tiger. Works like a charm.

Tip that I can give is to set up a higher memory limit. For some reason, PHP on Mac OS consumes more memory than on other platforms as far as we can tell. Because of that, give up to 64MB or 128MB to your scripts instead of up to 32MB to accomodate peaks in memory usage (like image resizing for example). Regular requests consume ~10MB of memory so you should not worry about that.
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avatar spfolly Jan 27. 2010. 7:25 am #3
Excellent. Thanks very much for the quick reply!
avatar Guy C. Dev Feb 25. 2010. 11:11 pm #4
I use OS X Server with multiple instances of activeCollab. activeCollab is at the core of my business and it works very well on Mac OS X. Note that the php.ini file is located at /private/etc/ under OS X.

In addition to increasing the memory limit as Ilija suggested, I also altered the php.ini file to increase the max upload size for files, though this is not specific to OS X.

There is also some discussion in the forums about using crontab to schedule jobs for backups with activeCollab. The scheduling files are located in a different location on a Mac OS X server then they are on other Unix systems. They are here: /usr/lib/cron/tabs not here:/etc/crontab Use "crontab -l" to list the jobs. To use crontab with nano as the default editor, enter env EDITOR=nano crontab -e. To make this a permanent setting, editor bash_profile in the user home directory and add "export VISUAL='pico -w'" Use cron_diagnose.sh to install cron in Cygwin. Use cron_config to reinstall.

OS X Server works great with activeCollab - you just need to be aware of the file locations vs other Unix systems.

Regards,
Guy
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Feb 26. 2010. 3:14 am #5
I would like to add one thing specific to hosting activeCollab on Mac OS X - default version of PHP that ships with Mac OS 10.6 is latest stable version from PHP 5.3 branch (good thing), but it does not have IMAP extension compiled. This extension is required for Incoming Mail module to work properly.

If you want to set up IMAP extension in your PHP or Mac OS X, please follow these instructions.

@Guy: Thanks for contributing to this topic.
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avatar ArenThiru Pro Mar 30. 2010. 7:43 pm #6
Hi Guy's,

I"m thinking of moving my ActiveCollab installation from my hosted VPS because of speed issues that can't seem to be resolved.

I have a Mac OSX server running 10.4.11 (Older Gen but rock solid) and a Intel Mac Pro running Leopard. Was wondering where it would be better to install and if i would have any issues. Any steps i need to follow?

Thanks
Aren
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Mar 31. 2010. 8:18 am #7
Hello Aren,

Either will work just fine.

If you opt for Tiger, you can use older version of this package to get PHP and required extensions installed.

For Leopard, you can find instructions how to get PHP enabled here.

For both situations, you'll need to set up MySQL separately, so check MySQL website for download and details (you'll need community edition, and it ships with guided installer).
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avatar ArenThiru Pro Mar 31. 2010. 8:30 am #8
Thank you Ilija, if i go with Tiger would I problems in the future when aC moves to 3? Or for future proof it better to go with Leopard?

Thanks
Aren
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Apr 5. 2010. 6:42 am #9
Hello Aren,

There should be no problems with Tiger in the future, as long as you have PHP5.1 or later set up. activeCollab pretty much ignores the OS and web server if you have correct versions of PHP and MySQL installed.
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avatar specialopssecurity Pro Apr 5. 2010. 1:04 pm #10
Ilija Studen:
If you want to set up IMAP extension in your PHP or Mac OS X, please follow these instructions.


I spent all weekend with the instruction on that blog posting and they were slightly off. Finally figured out what was missing. Here are the full instructions.