Enable Local Websites In Mountain Lion With VirtualHostX [OS X Tips]

By Harsh Vardhan (Facebook) (Twitter)

You may have noticed that in addition to all the things Mountain Lion adds to OS X, its also taken a few away. If you run a web server on your Mac, or develop websites on your local machine, you’ll also have noticed that the option to turn the local web server on or off is missing from System Preferences. Apache, the industry-standard web server that has come bundled with OS X since the first version, is still there, but there is no longer a way to enable the actual server.

Until now, that is, with a third party app called VirtualHostX.

VirtualHostX 3.0 lets you enable the web service already present on your Mac, and it allows you to create multiple virtual hosts as well. That way, you can create and test more than one website at a time right from your Mac. Even better, there’s a service called LiftOff that lets you share these virtual websites with other people, notifying them of the location with a simple email. Here’s a demo of that service:

You can purchase LiftOff for a monthly fee of $10, or buy 24 hour access credits for $1 each. Seems like a great deal if you have clients or collaborators who need to access a locally hosted website from your Mac.

Oh, and the developer also created a replacement System Preferences pane that puts the Apache on/off toggle back in place. Slick! Simply download it from his blog page and double click on the un-zipped file to replace your current 10.8 Web Sharing preference pane.

Please feel free to comment on this post:

You can also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter

Posted in: