Ralph Schindler has a new post to his blog today detailing the process you'll need to compile Gearman (or just about anything) on a Zend Server CE install on Snow Leopard.

Zend Server CE for Mac (as of this writing), comes compiled as an i386 executable only. This includes the PHP binary, php library, and apache binaries that come shipped with ZSCE. While ZSCE works great out the box with all the provided extensions, you might find that you want some additional 3rd party PHP extensions compiled/linked into this stack. That's where things get a little confusing, and in this post, we’ll look at how to install the gearman extension.

He give two methods - the easy way where you can export a CFLAGS setting to compile with multiple architectures or the harder way (that works for Gearman), building static libraries. The full list of commands (and some example output) is included in the post. In the comments there's also an example of the install if you're using Macports.

On his blog today Leniel Macaferi has a new post showing how to install PHP on OSX 10.6.5, really enabling the PHP that's already installed.

I hit a pretty good tutorial to enable PHP on Mac at About.com written by Angela Bradley that gets to the point: How to Install PHP on a Mac. Along the way I had to solve only one minor thing described in the caveat section at the end of this post. You see that the title of this post has the word installing (well I thought I had to install it – that was my first reaction), but in fact it could be the word enabling because PHP is an integral part of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and we just need to enable it as you’ll see soon.

He talks about enabling the web server, enabling PHP and testing the installation with a phpinfo. There's screenshots included so you can be sure you're in the right places.

Vid Luther has posted a guide for getting the latest version of SSH working as a PHP extension on your Snow Leopard installation.

Getting PHP with SSH support is not an easy task in Snow Leopard. If you need it, here’s a hackish way to do it, until Sara or Mike get around to patching the ssh2 in PECL.

You'll need Xcode and Brew to follow along with his example. He shows you how to set things set up (fail the pecl install), patch that failed file with the patch here and make/make install and you should have a nice shared object (.so) you can now install into your PHP instance.

Fabien Potencier has been moving over to the Mac OSX platform for some of his development and figured out that he needed a custom installation of PHP 5.3, different than the one that comes with the default install of Snow Leopard. The process was a bit tricky, so he's written up a post as a guide for those wanting to do it too.

To do my work, I need to have several different versions of PHP at hand, with different configurations, and so I always compile my own PHP and Apache binaries on my Mac. [...] Now that I use PHP 5.3.0 more and more, I decided it was time to compile my own version. As it turns out, compiling PHP 5.3.0 on Snow Leopard is a bit involving.

He walks you through the configure command he used, how he patched the iconv.c file, patch the source of PHP with the change and recompile with an EXTRA_LIBs environment variable set. The steps he followed were based on the hints provided in this bug from the PHP.net website.

If you've been puzzling on how to get a custom installation of PHP, MySQL and Apache set up on your Snow Leopard (OS X) upgrade, Rob Allen has just the post you've been looking for:

With OS X 10.6, Apple ships PHP 5.3 with PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL out of the box. Also, everything is now 64bit. This means that the entire effort required to get a working PHP dev environment for my work is now much easier.

He walks you through the modifications needed for files in /usr/local, changes to get MySQL started, updates to the Apache configuration to get it playing nicely with the PHP5 module and changes to the php.ini and Xdebug configurations to pick up the right extensions directory.

David Kent Norman has posted a new guide for those Drupal users wanting to get your favorite CMS up and running on the latest version of Apple's OS (Snow Leopard). The real issue comes with the stock Drupal install and the PHP 5.3 Snow Leopard comes bundled with.

Drupal 6 probably won't ever work right on PHP 5.3.0, which is what Snow Leopard packs by default. My feeling is that since Ubuntu LTS still runs PHP 5.2, Drupal 7 won't work at production level on PHP 5.3.0 either. For that reason, here is my PHP 5.2.10 install instructions for Snow Leopard. It will trash your built-in Snow Leopard install.

He includes links to the various packages you'd need to download and the configure command with a hefty helping of parameters to get things set up correctly. Also, as mentioned in one of the comments, there is a patch that can be applied to make the system work correctly with PHP 5.3.

If you're a Zend Studio IDE user and are having trouble on the latest release of Apple's operating system (Snow Leopard), Davey Shafik might be able to help. In these two posts he walks you through how you can fix a crashing issue and a problem that comes up when selecting text.

For the first problem:

OSX Leopard, it has seemed for a while, like the app was decaying - growing progressively crashier the more I used it. Literally, to the point where I could use it. I think, however, I have solved the issue. [...] This just explicitly makes it use JVM 1.5, which is, after all, what it was built for.

And for the second (text selection):

If you are still using Zend Studio 5.5, and recently upgrade to Snow Leopard, you will have spotted pretty quickly there is a pretty severe display bug when selecting text. The reason for this, is that Snow Leopard only ships with Java 1.6 and 1.3 (wtf?) [...] It essentially comes down to this: Grab the Java 1.5 JDK from Leopard (original) and then tell OSX to use the 32bit version by default.

You can find out more information on the cause of this problem here.