Installing Apache modules on Mac OS X Leopard
Installing mod_python on my mac laptop was surprisingly difficult. My first attempt of simply compiling it with {LD,C}FLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64" failed in a bit of a strange way. It appeared to create a universal binary for the DSO, but apache failed to load it with the following error message:
httpd: Syntax error on line 118 of /Volumes/Workplace/pflex/2.1.x/Build/build/ValidationWeb/apache/etc/httpd.conf: Syntax error on line 22 of /Volumes/Workplace/pflex/2.1.x/Build/build/ValidationWeb/apache/etc/platform/i386.Mac OS X/httpd.conf: Can't locate API module structure `python_module' in file /usr/libexec/apache2/mod_python.so: dlsym(0x100201000, python_module): symbol not found
As it turns out, the build process was respecting the LDFLAGS & CFLAGS for processes called directly by make, but it was not passing them on to apxs. Adding the following to src/Makefile (after the initial INCLUDE declaration) worked to put apxs on the right track:
INCLUDES+= -Wc,-arch -Wc,ppc -Wc,-arch -Wc,ppc64 -Wc,-arch -Wc,i386 -Wc,-arch -Wc,x86_64
INCLUDES+= -Wl,-arch -Wl,ppc -Wl,-arch -Wl,ppc64 -Wl,-arch -Wl,i386 -Wl,-arch -Wl,x86_64
So, the procedure to install mod_python is:
- Download source here
- ./configure
- Add above two lines to src/Makefile
- make
- sudo make install or sudo make install_dso
tech stuff. 
Bless you for this post . . . you just cleared up two hours of frustration!
Dave Haas
2008-12-15 at 00:44
Hmmm, seems my last comment hasn’t been accepted, so will try again with some more information.
Note that the information in original post is not enough to get mod_python working correctly on MacOS X under 64 bit Apache. This will only fix up mod_python module itself and will not result in Python C extension modules the package installs being compiled correctly. That is, the PSP handler for mod_python will fail.
The better approach is to check out latest mod_python from subversion repository and use that, as it includes all the required fixes to get it working.
svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/quetzalcoatl/mod_python/trunk mod_python
cd mod_python
./configure
make
sudo make install
BTW, you cannot only do ‘make install_dso’ as original post suggests as that only installs Apache module and not the Python package component.
FWIW, if you didn’t care about PHP handler, or even publisher handler for that matter, you shouldn’t use mod_python anyway as there are better options for Python hosting in conjunction with Apache these days.
Graham Dumpleton
2009-01-07 at 23:09