Setting up the W3C Markup Validation Service locally on OS X

23 Oct 2009

The W3C Markup Validation Service is great but validating development or intranet content that's not open to the outside is a bit of a messy process of copying page source to then paste in the direct input window. What we need to do is run the validator locally which is very easy to setup on OS X thanks to the free Validator S.A.C.

When you open up Validator S.A.C. you get the same W3C validator interface except it's running locally and can therefore validate local content. You could validate content from the Validator S.A.C. window but a much cooler method is to setup Validator S.A.C. as a web service and, assuming you installed Validator S.A.C. in /Applications and are running the Apache built in to Snow Leopard, is achieved with the following terminal commands:

cd /Applications/Validator-SAC.app/Contents/Resources
sudo cp validator/httpd/conf/validator-SAC-10.5.conf /etc/apache2/other
sudo apachectl graceful

The Validator S.A.C. app no longer needs to be open with the web service now available at http://localhost/w3c-validator/ although I prefer to use the following bookmarklet to validate the current page I'm working on: Validate Bookmarklet.