If it is the first time you are using a Mac to develop applications of any kind, you will have to start by installing Xcode. You can find this application for free on the App Store:

Another indispensable tool for Mac users is Brew. This is the package manager for OS X and will help us install PHP with almost no pain. To install it, run the following command on your command line:

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

If you already have Brew installed, you can make sure that everything works fine by running these two commands:

$ brew doctor
$ brew update

It is time to install PHP 7 using Brew. To do so, you will just need to run one command, as follows:

$ brew install homebrew/php/php70

The result should be as shown in the following screenshot:

Make sure to add the binary to your PATH environment variable by executing this command:

$ export PATH="$(brew --prefix homebrew/php/php70)/bin:$PATH"

You can check whether your installation was successful by asking which version of PHP your system is using with the $ php –v command.

As pointed out at the beginning of this section, MySQL is a tricky one for Mac users. You need to download the MySQL server installer and MySQL Workbench as the client. The MySQL server installer can be found at https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/. You should find a list of different options, as shown here:

The easiest way to go is to download DMG Archive. You will be asked to log in with your Oracle account; you can create one if you do not have any. After this, the download will start. As with any DMG package, just double-click on it and go through the options—in this case, just click on Next all the time. Be careful because at the end of the process, you will be prompted with a message similar to this:

Make a note of it; otherwise, you will have to reset the root password. The next one is MySQL Workbench, which you can find at http://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/. The process is the same; you will be asked to log in, and then you will get a DMG file. Click on Next until the end of the installation wizard. Once done, you can launch the application; it should look similar to this:

In order to install Nginx, we will use Brew, as we did with PHP. The command is the following:

$ brew install nginx

If you want to make Nginx start every time you start your laptop, run the following command:

$ ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/nginx/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents

If you have to change the configuration of Nginx, you will find the file in /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf. You can change things, such as the port that Nginx is listening to or the root directory where your code is (the default directory is /usr/local/Cellar/nginx/1.8.1/html/). Remember to restart Nginx to apply the changes with the sudo nginx command.

Installing Composer is as easy as downloading it with the curl command; move the binary to /usr/local/bin/ with the following two commands:

$ curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
$ mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

In order to install PHP 7, you will first download the installer from the official website. For this, go to http://windows.php.net/download. The options should be similar to the following screenshot:

Choose x86 Thread Safe for Windows 32-bit or x64 Thread Safe for the 64-bit one. Once downloaded, uncompress it in C:\php7. Yes, that is it!

Installing MySQL is a little more complex. Download the installer from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/installer/ and execute it. After accepting the license agreement, you will get a window similar to the following one:

For the purposes of the book—and actually for any development environment—you should go for the first option: Developer Default. Keep going forward, leaving all the default options, until you get a window similar to this:

Depending on your preferences, you can either just set a password for the root user, which is enough as it is only a development machine, or you can add an extra user by clicking on Add User. Make sure to set the correct name, password, and permissions. A user named test with administration permissions should look similar to the following screenshot:

For the rest of the installation process, you can select all the default options.

The installation for Nginx is almost identical to the PHP 7 one. First, download the ZIP file from http://nginx.org/en/download.html. At the time of writing, the versions available are as follows:

You can safely download the mainline version 1.9.10 or a later one if it is stable. Once the file is downloaded, uncompress it in C:\nginx and run the following commands to start the web server:

$ cd nginx
$ start nginx

To finish with the setup, we need to install Composer. To go for the automatic installation, just download the installer from https://getcomposer.org/Composer-Setup.exe. Once downloaded, execute it in order to install Composer on your system and to update your PATH environment variable.

The only thing to consider in this section is to remove any previous PHP versions on your system. To do so, you can run the following command:

$ sudo apt-get -y purge php.*

The next step is to add the necessary repositories in order to fetch the correct PHP version. The commands to add and update them are:

$ sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
$ sudo LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php -y
$ sudo apt-get update

Finally, we need to install PHP 7 together with the driver for MySQL. For this, just execute the following three commands:

$ sudo apt-get install php7.0 php7.0-fpm php7.0-mysql -y
$ sudo apt-get --purge autoremove -y
$ sudo service php7.0-fpm start

Installing MySQL manually can be slightly different than with the Vagrant script. As we can interact with the console, we do not have to specify the root password previously; instead, we can force MySQL to prompt for it. Run the following command and keep in mind that the installer will ask you for the password:

$ sudo apt-get -y install mysql-server mysql-client

Once done, if you need to start the MySQL server, you can do it with the following command:

$ sudo service mysql start

The first thing that you need to know is that you can only have one web server listening on the same port. As port 80 is the default one for web applications, if you are running Apache on your Ubuntu machine, you will not be able to start an Nginx web server listening on the same port 80. To fix this, you can either change the ports for Nginx or Apache, stop Apache, or uninstall it. Either way, the installation command for Nginx is as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install nginx –y

Now, you will need to enable a site with Nginx. The sites are files under /etc/nginx/sites-available. There is already one file there, default, which you can safely replace with the following content:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

    root /var/www/html;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    server_name server_domain_or_IP;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri /index.php =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

This configuration basically points the root directory of your web application to the /var/www/html directory. You can choose the one that you prefer, but make sure that it has the right permissions. It also listens on the port 80, which you can change with the one you prefer; just keep this in mind that when you try to access your application via a browser. Finally, to apply all the changes, run the following command:

$ sudo service nginx restart