I recently retooled a Zend development environment on a mac laptop running OS X. I had been using the free version of MAMP for awhile but found the free version too limited.  MAMP is useful for getting  Apache, PHP, and MySQL stack up and working together quickly on a mac.  One thing lacking in MAMP though is an actual http.conf file like you probably deal with on a production server.

XAMP is another free AMP stack which includes an editable httpd.conf file making configuring Apache to test SSL connections much more standardized if not straight forward.  Instead of dealing with a GUI one deals with the Apache configuration files directly.  While it’s nice to be able to customize XAMPs Apache installation getting the configuration right can take some time.  If your really uncomfortable meddling with Apache configuration files you should consider just purchasing a licensed version of MAMP which does most of the stuff through a graphical interface.  Of course once you go into production you’ll probably going to have to deal with Apache’s httpd.conf file anyway so you might as well front load the pain now and be better prepared when things actually do go into production.