Turn on Apache and PHP on your Mac

1. Turn on Apache:

   • On Lion and below machines: turn Web Sharing on in your Mac's System Pref­er­ences Sharing. It will display the IP on where you can view the pages from your Sites directory. I don't know how this would work on Mountain Lion as they've removed that option from the sharing pref­er­ences;
   • On Mountain Lion and above machines execute the following command sudo apachectl start;

2. Turn on PHP support in Apache by editing /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf and un­com­ment­ing the line:

   LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
   

3. Create the PHP.ini file by going to /private/etc/ and doing sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini. I also turned debug mode on: search for dis­play_er­rors in php.ini and make sure that Default Value is set to On.

4. Create a /Users/[y­our_­com­put­er_user­name]/Sites directory if it doesn't already exist;

5. If you'd like to run projects from other di­rec­to­ries (like I do) I recommend simlinking to them from your Sites directory. However that does mean that you'll have to turn this feature on in Apache by adding Fol­lowSym­Links to Options Indexes Multiviews in /etc/apache2/users/[y­our_­com­put­er_user­name].conf. See this Stack­over­flow question; OR follow along and use the setup below in the Using Virtual Hosts section.

6. Restart Apache: sudo apachectl graceful.

Using Mass Virtual Hosts

This method makes adding websites to your Sites directory and running them a one action event. All you have to do is create (or symlink) the folder in the Sites directory.

1. Make sure that in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf the following lines are enabled (not commented out) (this requires Apache v1.3.6 or above (default in Mac OS X Mavericks is 2.2.24):

   Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf
   
   Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
   
   LoadModule vhost_alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_vhost_alias.so
   

2. Make sure your /etc/apache2/users/[y­our_­com­put­er_user­name].conf consists of the following lines:

   <VirtualHost *:80>
       UseCanonicalName Off
       VirtualDocumentRoot /Users/[your_computer_username]/Sites/%0
   </VirtualHost>
   
   <Directory "/Users/[your_computer_username]/Sites">
       Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
       AllowOverride All
       Order allow,deny
       Allow from all
   </Directory>
   

   You will need the Directory directive to be able to use htaccess and symlinks.

3. Restart Apache: sudo apachectl graceful;

Now you can either install dnsmasq, a light­weight DNS forwarder and DHCP server, to do the domain/hostnaming au­to­mat­i­cal­ly, or you can opt to add one step to the website in­stal­la­tion: adding a line to /etc/hosts for each website.

127.0.0.1   [your-site-folder-name]