Production site on Mac 10.5 Server

First, thank you in advance to anyone who is willing to take the time to answer my questions (or point me in the right direction). The school where I teach has a Leopard server currently serving static webpages. I am new to Drupal and am hoping to use the BitNami Drupal stack in lieu of Apple’s modified versions of Apache, and php.
Questions: (1) Is the BitNami Drupal stack appropriate for a production environment, and if it is, (2) what steps are necessary to secure and serve via the Drupal stack on port 80?

Hi,

Yes, you can use the stack in production environment. Even if you install phpmyadmin it is secured to be only accessible from the machine where the stack is installed. However, take into account that you should setup passwords with a secure value during installation.

If you want to use port 80 you will need to run the installer with root privileges. If there’s a working server already serving static pages you will need to stop it before doing installation.
In case you want to make those files available through the new server, you may copy them to the new Apache server once it is installed ($installdir/apache2/htdocs directory), or you may install the stack on a different port and leave two servers running in the machine, but it depends on your needs.

Also, it may be useful for you to install the stack as a service so it is started each time the machine is started. You can follow this article to achieve that.

Finally, if you want the application to be in root path “http://domain/” instead of “http://domain/drupal/” this post may be useful for you.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Regards

This post may be useful for you as well.

Thank you for your help and references. A perfect summary.