Apple's new operating system, Mac OS X, has a UNIX at it's core. What can you do with that? Make a killer development box that includes runtime environments for PHP and MySQL! This article runs you through all the steps for building Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your Mac OS X-based box.
There are some problems with the built software when compiled as specified in this article, some because of the software itself, some not.
Firstly, the MySQL daemon that is compiled isn't able to shut down under Mac OS X. This is a known bug, but unfortunately there is no workaround or fix, so don't go trying to run mysqladmin shutdown expecting it to work.
Secondly, the way I have you build Apache in this article makes it so you can't load the mod_ssl module that comes with Mac OS X. This is because I felt the complexity of building an Apache with Extended API support as needed for mod_ssl, and compiling a new version of mod_ssl and it's support libraries, would add confusion to the article. I felt that this is a rarely needed feature, so this won't affect many of you.
If you need to use mod_ssl, you are able to build it by using the instructions that come with the module's source, if you are so inclined. Just be sure to use the same flags that you used in this article (--with-layout, --enable-shared, etc.) when compiling Apache, in addition to those required to make Apache work with mod_ssl. Mod_ssl can be found at http://www.mod-ssl.org.
This instructions in this article was tested and found to work on an iBook, an iMac DV, and a Power Macintosh G4 (PCI Graphics), all running Mac OS X 10.0.3. YMMV.
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