Best Practice Web Development Environment for OSX

What setups does everyone employ?

I am looking on working on a new web site and don't have anything set up on my laptop at the moment so would be good to get a proper set up going. I've read up on lots of different options and have used Vagrant in the past.

Not sure what I will be developing in - either PHP or Python.

Interested to see what everyone else uses.

If you already know Linux then stick with Vagrant, saves messing around with the host system and possibly breaking something that will be a pain to recover from. If you break a guest VM then you can just throw it away and rebuild a fresh one in a few minutes.

If you go for PHP then you can get a full dev environment set up from scratch in about 20 mins using https://puphpet.com. Just pick your setup (apache vs nginx, php version, etc). It will build a .vagrantfile and puppet manifest for you that you download as a zipfile and then extract to your project dir.

I would say MAMP. Works on Apache 2 and SQL.

Vagrant and Chef are nice for when you need a consistent, redeployable environment with multiple people working on one project. It's also really helpful if you're using funky versions of dependencies.

Just for a personal machine, an Apache/nginx stack is easy enough to setup on newer versions of OSX.

I use NodeJS with Mongo which is a breeze to setup