Mac OS Security ships fully locked down. The idea being to protect servers and vulnerable users from malicious attacks from the get-go.
Permalinks make use of .htaccess files to allow URL’s to point directly to a specific blog post while making reference to the title of the blog; so in this case : http://www.mathewjenkinson.co.uk/getting-permal…rk-in-mac-os-x rather than http://www.mathewjenkinson.co.uk/?postid=123456. This for users is considerably easier to read and to navigate to.
To get Permalinks to work on your Mac (or other Unix / Linux box) you need to give your web server access to write the .htaccess file for that site.
On Mac OS; the steps are:
1) Load terminal and navigate to the root folder of your website; usually: ‘/Library/WebServer/Documents/Domain.com’
2) Change the ownership of the file to the www group by ‘sudo chmod _www .htaccess’
3) Navigate to ‘/Private/etc/apache2/sites’ and open (nano) the file connected to your site. It will be something like: ‘0001_any_80_domain.com.conf’
4) In the conf file; find the reference “AllowOverride” and switch it from “None” to “All”. Save the file
5) At this point you can reload Apache or the whole server; I tend to reboot the server using ‘Sudo Reboot’ as it only takes a few seconds to reboot.