Gyorgy Fekete has provided what he calls a complete guide to PHP development on Mac OS X in a recent blog entry.

Finally, I switched entirely to Mac. It is a little frustrating that there is not a complete resource on how to set up a web development enviroment on Mac OS X. The majority of tutorials are outdated. I will try to write this guide as complete as possible.

The guide provides basic installation instructions for PHP, MySQL (XAMPP or MAMP), the configuration of these two packages, throwing XDebug in to help with your debugging, installing Subversion and picking out your IDE of choice. He also suggests a somewhat optional step - setting up a Windows virtual machine to be able to test things out cross-platform without the need for a separate machine.

On the Developer Tutorials blog, there's a new post showing you what all you'll need to install to work with WordPress offline "like a pro" on your local machine.

I used to work off of my web server but the problem I've had lately is that when I'm not connected to the internet I haven't been able to code for Wordpress in a way that allows me to view my changes. Since I started using the techniques used in this tutorial my productivity has increased significantly.

His method has you install MAMP on your local machine (for the Windows users, WAMP is just about as easy to set up) and how to import content over from your remote server to the local machine. Of course, you could just set up a subversion repository, but that's another tutorial...

Felix Geisendorfer shows, in a new blog post today, how to setup XDebug (the popular debugging extension for PHP) on a Mac OSx (or Win32/Linux) system.

One of the biggest obstacles when getting started with Xdebug was that I had a hard time finding good instructions on how to set it up on Mac OS X (I finally got rid of windows, yeah !). The only good resource I found was stored in Googles cache (wasn't live anymore) and had instructions on how to manually build xdebug from source.

His is a four step process of installing XDebug support on his MAMP setup - including a few configuration directives you'll need to apply to get XDebug support included.

Stefan Mischook has taken a little time out from his beginner's guides to PHP to post today about the simplest way to set up PHP and MySQL on a Mac - MAMP.

In my beginners php videos, I recommended XAMPP as the way to easily install Apache, PHP, MySQL on a MAC. [...] This nifty little application allows you to (really easily) install Apache, PHP and MySQL. You are provided with a standard DMG file that you simply drag to your applications folder.

He includes screenshots, details on what the package contains, sample code using it and, of course, the Dashboard widget to start and stop the Apache and MySQL servers.

According to this new post on Christian Spanning's blog, there's been an updated version of MAMP released.

MAMP (Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP) is an excelent environment if you're planning to do some PHP development on your Mac. As they state on the MAMP website, it should therefore not be used as Live Webserver for the Internet.

He listsrest of the list on his post, or just head right over and download it now...

Via this pointer from Nexen.net today, there's information about a new a new Apache/PHP/MySQL package for the OS X crowd - MAMP.

The abbreviation MAMP stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. With just a few mouse-clicks, you can install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X!

MAMP is installed in the typical Mac fashion: very easily. MAMP will not compromise any existing Apache installation already running with your OS X. You can install Apache, PHP and MySQL without starting a script or having to change any configuration files!

What's more, if MAMP is no longer needed, it is sufficient to delete the MAMP folder and everything returns to its original status (i.e. MAMP does not modify any of the "normal" OS X).

Sounds like they've got the Mac way of doing things down, and the idea of being just a few clicks away from a running server is definitely appealing...