Eric Barnes has posted a guide to helping you set up (as he sees it) a good PHP development environment on your Mac that includes Homebrew for package management, Composer, Vagrant and the Laravel Homestead VM for project hosting.

This past weekend I decided it was finally time to wipe my Macbook’s hard drive and start fresh. I have used it daily for several years now and still had artifacts from when I used Mamp. Since then Vagrant has turned to my local server of choice and one of the reasons is how clean you can keep your machine by utilizing it.

After finishing the new Mac OS X install it felt like a new beginning. So clean, so minimal. [...] This go around I wanted to keep it as minimal as possible and only install things I know I need and use. This tutorial covers how I set up my Mac for local PHP Development.

His list of software includes the previously mentioned four as well as the ZSH shell replacing the default bash and, obviously, PHP itself installed via Homebrew.