The problem with the whole process was the Apple compiled version of Apache runs at 64Bit, and at present it’s not possible to compile the  PHP 5.3 Apache module to be compatible. The solution is to cut the Apache binary back to run at 32Bit. That can be done quite simply and is explained by Tony Bibbs back in June with PHP 5.3 on Mac OS X 10.5.

Once you’ve cut Apache back to 32Bit, you just need to install MySQL. Before I read Tony’s post I went to all the effort of compiling MySQL 5.1RC in 64Bit, then found out that PHP wasn’t compatible with the 64bit. Installing a released version of MySQL is simple, and in my opinion not worth going through the effort of compiling from source (unless you need some special functionality). I just took the latest release from the MySQL download site and installed it (after removing numerious other versions first, see below).

After MySQL was running, I downloaded the latest snapshot of PHP 5.3 from snaps.php.net , extracted, then ran the following configure command.

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/php53 \
--with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-config-file-scan-dir=/usr/local/php53/php.d \
--with-iconv --with-openssl=/usr --enable-ftp --enable-sockets \
--enable-mbstring --enable-calendar --enable-bcmath \
--with-curl=shared,/usr/local/php53 --with-zlib-dir=/usr  \
--with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Note my use of –prefix=/usr/local/php53 – this was my choice, as I didn’t want it to potentially overwrite my php 5.2 installation that was there.

The important elements here are –prefix and –with-mysqli

Also – I’m not 100% on what –with-config-file-scan-dir does, but it caused no problems.

After configure succeeds I ran

sudo make

Then after a cofee/beer I ran

sudo make install

From what I could gather, the install procedure created the libphp5.so file inside the /libexec/apache2/ directory (overwriting the one that was previously there), and also added the ‘loadModule’ line within the apache config file @ /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf. If I did this again, I would backup previous php libraries.

Finally, a sudo apachectl restart restarts the apache server and I was on my way.

Footnotes:

Here’s some locations I found useful

Apache’s Httpd.conf is @ /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

The APXS libraries are @ /usr/sbin/apxs

PHP & MySQL (by default) install to /usr/local/

MySQL

Throughout this whole trial and error process, I think I installed MySQL about three different times. Before finally just downloading the latest 5.0 release I took some steps to remove the previous installations. If you’ve installed MySQL many times (like I did) and you’re a bit conscious about having junk all over the place then best place to start looking for information on what’s installed where is the Readme.txt file that comes with the OS X package installer, and also the Mysql Installation notes for OS X. 

An article I found that also helped me search for some lost MySQL installs, and shed some light on what to do was this post titled Removing MySql – by Lee Hambly.