Java 7 and Mac OS X

After getting my new Mac Mini pretty well set up with my development tools, I started playing with Amazon AWS. When trying to connect to one of my instances using their built in tool, Firefox bailed and I was presented with a prompt asking me if I wanted to install Java:

To open “Firefox,” you need a Java SE 6 runtime. Would you like to install one now?

Now this message looked very official, and I’d seen it before when starting up something on a new Mac that required Java, but since I’d already installed the latest JDK I was thoroughly confused. I thought, “OK, maybe you didn’t install Java after all”

So I popped open a terminal and

mini:~ robweaver$ java -version
java version “1.7.0_09″
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_09-b05)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.5-b02, mixed mode.

OK, so that’s not it – so I changed browsers and tried the browser check at http://javatester.org again, only to get the same results …

Ouch – so I dug around a bit, and couldn’t find anything about how to fix it. And in fact the little bit I did find only confirmed that the browser plugin was active and the right version.

So finally I decided to punt and just let it install – Clicking the button to to let it start ran a package that looked like it was installing something, and when it was done another trip to javatester.org showed that somehow the plugin had been fixed and was now giving me the right version of Java in all my browsers.

The only thing I can guess is that there was something that had to be set up on first use, but it did give me a start when being asked to install Java SE 6. Fortunately, whatever it did, it didn’t muck with my JVM and I’ll just have to hope that it didn’t break anything elsewhere.

 

Adding Missing PHP library on Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8)

I’m doing some work on a project that is using PHP, and have been working on setting up some continuous integration build scripts to make sure that we have a shot at catching errors before they make their way to production.

Recently some unit tests were added for the “forgot password” code, which uses the mcrypt libraries which are not installed by default on Mac OSX, so I was seeing this error:

Call to undefined function mcrypt_get_iv_size()

So some quick Google searches, and I found a couple of blogs with “how to” install the library (links at the end of this post), and proceeded to get this done.

First step was to download the mcrypt from SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=87941

Once I had the file, I opened a command prompt and ran:

tar xvfz libmcrypt-2.5.8.tar.gz
cd libmcrypt-2.5.8/

Next I ran configure, setting the appropriate flags for my envirionment (note – I didn’t do this for the other configures, probably would have been a good idea):

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.8 CFLAGS=’-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64′ LDFLAGS=’-O3 -arch i386 -arch x86_64′ CXXFLAGS=’-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64′ ./configure –disable-dependency-tracking

This sets up the make file, so you can run the next two commands:

make -j6

sudo make install

Next to make the PHP library, I needed the PHP source files, so I went out and grabbed PHP 5.3.15 (since that’s the version I have when I run php -version) by going to http://us3.php.net/get/php-5.3.15.tar.bz2/from/a/mirror. Note that you can simply change the version number in that URL to get the version you need.

Once I had that I did the following:

tar xvfz php-5.3.15.tar.bz2
cd php-5.3.15/ext/mcrypt
/usr/bin/phpize

This of course gave me an error about autoconf not being installed:

Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the $PHP_AUTOCONF environment variable. Then, rerun this script.

From there I installed autoconf by doing the following:

curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-latest.tar.gz
tar xvfz autoconf-latest.tar.gz
cd autoconf-2.69/
./configure
make
sudo make install

Then back to the php mcrypt folder and reran the phpize step to and finish building:

/usr/bin/phpize
./configure
make
sudo make install

Finally an edit to the php.ini file which was simply to add the extension:

extension=”/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/mcrypt.so”

And of course a quick restart of Apache and the extension shows up and I can run my unit tests successfully.

Related posts:

http://www.coolestguyplanettech.com/how-to-install-mcrypt-for-php-on-mac-osx-lion-10-7-development-server/

http://michaelgracie.com/2011/07/21/plugging-mcrypt-into-php-on-mac-os-x-lion-10-7/