Upgrade native apache from 2.2.21 to 2.4.2 - Lion 10.7.4

Question

As stated in the title, i have apache 2.2.21 running natively as part of my LAMP stack. I would like to upgrade apache to the latest version - 2.4.2. Is there a recommended or best practice to safely perform this operation without breaking stuff of loosing existing settings, etc?

Thank you for the time and direction.

Answer 1

I was able to install the latest version (2.4.2) using the steps below.

Install pcre (perl compatible regular-expression library) using fink (or what ever osx package manager you use)

$ fink install pcre

Install the latest (2.4.2 as of writing this) using the steps below

$ sudp apachectl stop
$ cd ~/Downloads/
$ curl -O http://mirror.uoregon.edu/apache//httpd/httpd-2.4.2.tar.gz
$ gzip -d httpd-2.4.2.tar.gz
$ tar xvf httpd-2.4.2.tar
$ cd httpd-2.4.2
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

However, the new binaries got installed under /usr/local and doesn't seem to have overridden the default install locations on OSX lion. And I could not find a config.nice file to use as suggested by the apache upgrade documentation.

The original apache files httpd, apachectl and ab were located on /usr/sbin. Without having found any documentation to confirm this was the right thing to do, I went ahead and backed up the original files and sym-linked the new files from /usr/local/bin into /usr/sbin, as follows.

$ cd /usr/sbin

# backup the original files ...

$ sudo ln -s ../local/bin/ab ab
$ sudo ln -s ../local/bin/apachectl apachectl
$ sudo ln -s ../local/bin/httpd httpd 

This seems to have worked, although it would be nice to get a confirmation from someone in the know.