Here’s a modest attempt to capture a few ideas as they fly by in the course of managing small businesses and a portfolio of websites. OS X, PHP, WordPress, site performance, and more…
On El Capitan, macOS Server 5.2 wants a mismatching PHP component, and on Sierra, 5.2’s PHP configuration is ignored by the operating system. If you really have to run 5.2 on Sierra, here’s a hacky fix.
With the Server 5.1 update providing TLS 1.2 support at last, courtesy of LibreSSL 2.2.6, it’s easy to score A+ on the Qualys SSL Server Test. Here’s a quick run-through of how to get the best performance from the new version.
As of version 5, the Server app still only supports TLS version 1.0 and a handful of suitable ciphers, but even within those constraints, we can improve the situation significantly by shutting off RC4 support and setting a preferred cipher order.
Unless you’re still using a version of the Server app released in 2013 or before, setting up OCSP stapling on OS X is very straightforward. Here’s how to boost performance by configuring OCSP stapling, plus an extra note to clear up some confusion about HSTS.
When figuring out whether they’re communicating with the outside world over HTTPS, applications can check whether they’re behind a reverse proxy which forwarded an HTTPS request over plain HTTP. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t do that, so here are two ways to get it working again on Server 5.
With version 5 of the Server app for OS X, Apache has problems correctly delivering TLS-enabled sites that use aliases, for example wrongly sending the ‘www’ variant of a site to the server’s default site. Here’s how to fix it.
Several small tweaks can improve the performance of the Apache proxy introduced in version 5 of the Server app for OS X.
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