Confessions of a cat

If you want to do any kind of web-development on the Mac that involves PHP and the Apache webserver, you have a few options:

1. Use the Apple provided, built-in apache plus PHP. You can turn on the web-server (with PHP) in your system preferences menu as ‘Web Sharing’. From that point on your Sites directory will function as your web document root (~/Sites). The bad thing with this setup is that you cannot just install any kind of PHP module, or apache module. Or if you do, you will regret it once the next system update arrives from Apple (which - by the way - overrides all your changes…)
2. Download and use MAMP. I have seen it used in lots of tutorials and books. The only bad thing with it, is that it is quite spartan, and has been updated quite a long time before (2008-08-27) - seems that its devs are abandoning it for good. Not recommended.
3. My recommendation is to use XAMPP. The good thing with XAMPP is that it is more or less regularly updated with not so major breaking changes, but still keeping you on top of the almost very latest PHP / MySQL releases. XAMPP is also cross platform in the widest sense of the world. This is good mostly for Mac / Windows users, but some Linux users could also benefit. XAMPP is available for the Mac, Windows, Linux, and Solaris platforms.

I have been using XAMPP for almost 2 years now. I have just recently upgraded my previous pre1.0 version to its latest 1.0.1 version - which includes MySQL 5.1.33, PHP 5.2.9, Apache2.2.11 with mod_ssl support and tons of other modules. You can download the OSX version from here.

If you use XAMPP you will just unpack its files into your /Applications folder (the path must be this, otherwise all the scripts will break inside), then drag /Applications/XAMPP/XAMPP Control to your dock and you can start enjoying it.

I do have a few recommendations for OSX users though.
None are too important, it’s just my way of thinking.
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