Having a development environment on a remote machine (maybe production, maybe test) is nice, but sometimes you just need the speed and simplicity that something a bit more local can give you. Vid Luther talks about setting up just such a local development environment on your Mac. (Sorry Windows guys - maybe check out WAMP)

This post is for the techies who know me, and are switching. Some are coming from Windows, some from Linux, some are designers who need to do some local development. So, I’ll try to keep this post as simple as possible, and perhaps more like a tutorial, where you can "copy and paste" commands and files.

He recommends a few pieces of software that you'll need - things like XAMPP and MySQL - and some other "nice to haves" like TextMate, Subversion and Expandrive. He shows how to set up the shell environment, create virtual hosts and add them into the /etc/hosts file so they'll resolve locally.