So since the complete develop environment on my Mac was blown away by reverting to a previous version of the OS, I started trying to put it all back together tonight. One piece that I really found useful was having my own local web environment on my laptop that basically mirrors my main site. That way, I could do development on my local machine and know that it will just work when I upload it to my main site.
Part way through the process of installing everything to my laptop, resident CSS guru and web-desiger Dale Mugford pings me and says “have you heard of MAMP?”
Of course, I hadn’t. But MAMP looks very, very cool. It’s an entire web environment on the Mac, in one easy install. It comes with Apache (a web server), MySQL (your friendly neighbourhood database), and of course PHP. So, instead of wasting countless hours installing stuff like Duane does, you can be like Dale and spend that time doing something else.
MAMP is a life saver. Do all my development locally with it. Moving things can be a bit of a headache, but nothing Duane Storey can’t handle.
MAMP Pro is even more amazing since it easily allows you to update your hosts file on your local machine so you can setup local copies of any production environments you want to replicate (or build from scratch). Sure you can do that manually yourself, but when it’s a configuration checkbox option, you might actually use the feature.