On the VG Tech blog today Erland Wiencke has posted a quick guide to the "three easy steps" he uses to set up a PHP development environment on OSX.

When I first started writing this post, I considered giving it a title such as “How to set up local PHP development with dynamically configured mass virtual hosting on Apache 2.4″, “Quick and easy prototyping using Liip PHP, Dnsmasq or Proxy Auto Configuration” or even “The Ultimate Guide to Rapid Development on OSX 10.10″. I did not.

In my daily job as a Development Manager, I don’t get to code very much, but when I do, I want to have a setup that allows me to quickly create development projects and prototypes in the ~/Sites folder and have them show up as vhosts automagically, without having to edit any configuration file(s).

His three steps do require a few prerequisites including Homebrew, but that's easy enough to set up. Here's his process:

• Step 1 – installing (my preferred version of) PHP
• Step 2 – enable hosting under ~/Sites
• Step 3 – add a local DNS server

He also includes a "Step 3a" that shows how to test the installation via a simple response from each of the domains.