I enabled PHP and installed MySQL on my Mac at home. Then I set up Drupal. It was really pretty darn easy. Even if you're afraid of the command line, it's not that hard when you follow these step-by-step instructions at MacZealots.
My only advice for anyone wanting to try this: do follow the directions and install version 4.0, not the latest version. I installed the later version and ran into the same problem described in the comments at the bottom of the article.
So setting it up was easy enough. It worked, looked great, etc. Only now I want to make it available to the outside world. Getting a dynamic DNS hostname was easy enough, and forwarding port 80 to my Mac's IP address was a piece of cake (I did have to assign my Mac a static private IP address, though). So now my Mac at home is a Web server.
Problem is, when I visit the drupal site, somehow it tries to resolve the URL to my local hostname. Which makes sense since I originally configured it with base URL http://localhost/drupal. But after changing that line in settings.php and restarting Apache, it still doesn't work. See what I mean?
I can't resolve zac.is-a-geek.com but I notice that your URL doesn't end with a slash. Assuming Drupal is in a folder, then that's not a legal URL and Apache will automatically issue a redirect to the URL with a slash, but it will use the canonical server name (or virtual host name if you're using them). If that is localhost then that's where it will redirect.
Try setting the ServerName directive in your Apache config to zac.is-a-geek.com and restarting Apache.
Alternatively if you're running Apache 2 there's a directive called UseCanonicalName which you can set to Off and it should use the hostname and port that were supplied by the client when it issues the redirect.
Posted by: Julian | March 21, 2007 at 02:40