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As soon as latest versions of Drupal 6 work supposedly fine with PHP 5.3 I decided to give it a try with OSX 10.6 bundled PHP version. Many would say it misses mcrypt, but I don't need it at the moment. Here are a few tips on how to make web development environment working on Snow Leopard. Actually it's probably complete walk trough for majority of cases.

Since OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) I've gone supposedly easy way using MAMP as dev server. I never really liked it but now it was insane: turned out MAMP is so hogging the system on OSX 10.6. The only way was to have some native 64-bit server running PHP 5.2.x. I really feel that 64-bit apps are much faster at least at releasing some valuable RAM.

First off I don't really like to go with extra apps on my Mac. So with Leopard I'd use (mark's) PHP (as 10.5.x didn't have GD support at least) and official MySQL distribution. With Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) Apple did a great job rolling out quite a nice http server but to the date it's way too advanced for my normal dev life. None of the web apps I do develop with (Druapl, ExpressionEngine, Joomla, WP ... ) are ready for PHP 5.3 yet. So the only choice was downgrade.

I've tried a few ways as MacProts, compiling my own PHP (and libs) but that was not even 90% successful or buggy. So I looked to MAMP again. Here are a few tips to get MAMP running nicely at OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard):