There are several ways how to do PHP development on mac OS X. I used MAMP before, which is really simple to use, basic features are free and no special configuration is needed. Also virtual hosts are easy to manage. But I had problem to make mongoDB working.
After several hours of fight with console and trying about 5 different tutorials I gave up. Finally I found great tool from company softaculous. AMPPS - http://www.ampps.com is stack of Apache, MySQL, MongoDB, PHP, Perl & Python. All of this tools are ready to use out of the box.
It contains also plenty of web application, which is very simple to install (Joomla, WordPress, Magento, etc)
Default localhost folder is basically /Applications/AMPPS/www/
You can access it via your favourite browser by typing http://localhost
Default MySql credentials are root: mysql and default mongo credentials are admin:admin. I recommend to change it.
Enjoy!
