When it comes to developing PHP projects, historically developers using Mac computers have been pressed to deal with "take it or leave it" choice when they went shopping for local development environment options. There is half-baked built-in Apache + PHP setup that is provided along with the operating system, there are MAMP and XAMPP server bundles that come with what vendors think is necessary and there are virtualization software that promise Mac users the world of freedom only at a cost of performance.

When speed of your local development environment is of the essence, nothing can beat the speed of system native applications. This is where Homebrew kicks in with vast amount of apps that can be combined in a server stack that is customized for your needs without performance trade-offs.

The goal of this session is to demonstrate the pros and cons of using Homebrew to create development environment on Mac computers and create awareness of the benefits that Homebrew can provide for Drupal developers.

Raimonds is a Drupal developer at Wunderkraut Latvia.