Fix for Perl, GD, ImageMagick and more on MacOSX Tiger Server

How about perl, or PHP, or MySQL? I used to have a perfectly acceptable Movable Type blog (this one, in fact) running happy as a clam on this server. I had never been able to get ImageMagick to properly install, though, as well as some convenience modules like Compress, but hey, Leopard was going to make everything all better. However, when we (props to my son Arthur, whose patience and tenacity led to success) "upgraded," nothing worked anymore. The web is full of complaints about various pieces of this puzzle, so I will leave it up to you to go digging. As for my blog and other data-driven and dynamic graphics-based sites that used to reside on this server, they were defunct. Dead. Doornail dead.

GD is important, as is DBI, DBI::MySql, ImageMagick, PerlMagick, and others. Without them, the Blog just doesn't go. Of course, the major technologies like MySQL and PHP are essential, but the versions provided by Apple were either just plain broken, or were inadequate for the tasks at hand. Of course, we reinstalled!

MySQL and PHP installers are available and we installed them according to the clear instructions provided by MySQL.com and Marc Liyanage, respectively. The tricky part was getting the built-in PHP to shut off and the new one to turn on, but judicious application of the "refresh view" button on the server manager cured that.

Then we turned to MacPorts to install the additional modules. What a disaster.  Not MacPorts, mind you, it performed admirably. None of the ports we installed appeared in the list of installed perl modules, despite getting successful reports from MacPorts. I admit that after a few days of banging my head against the wall, I had had enough. Giving up, we scrapped Leopard Server and went back to Tiger Server. But, we were still without some modules.

It turns out that Apple's installation location for the remaining items is not where the rest of the world expects them to be. In the case of perl, when we check our version with CPAN, it reports that we have the current version of perl, and that our modules are installed. We were successfully able to install modules, and they all appear to install without issue, except for PerlMagick, which reports a whole pile of errors. More on that later. When we run the mt-check.cgi from the Movable Type installation, however, we get paths to multiple perl installs, none of which are the current version. Clearly, there is some major confusion here.

The solution turns out to be easy: ditch Apple's mangled perl distribution and put in a link to the good, current installation in its place. The following two lines in the terminal move the old perl installation to a safe place where it can do no harm, and then create the appropriate symbolic link to the /opt/local/bin/perl folder, where we have all of our modules installed.