Zend Technologies recently released a community edition of Zend Server, which provides a full stack of technologies that allows developers to have a LAMP installation ready in a matter of minutes. This is especially significant for developers working on Mac OS X, where Apache and PHP have historically been difficult to install despite the options of MAMP and MacPorts.

Install
The Zend Server CE edition can be downloaded for free from Zend’s website. The Mac OS X installer is around 156MB which includes Apache, MySQL, PHP and a series of tools to manage the installation. The installation went smoothly, placing all the files in the default location (/usr/local/zend).

Once the installation is complete, you are instructed to open an admin interface at http://localhost:10081/ (I had trouble opening the suggested https version). Once loaded, you are asked to set a password.

Interface
The interface is nicely done and features a monitor page (with dashboard, PHP and server info pages, and a log viewer), and a server setup page where you can enable PHP extensions, and Zend Server modules (Debugger, Optimizer and Data Cache come enabled by default).

There is a desktop tool to manage Zend Server called ZendController. I had to look for it since the information in the documentation is not correct. I found it in /usr/local/zend/ZendController.app/Contents/MacOS/ZendController

MySQL
MySQL installation is up to date and is located in /usr/local/zend/mysql

You can manage it with the included phpMyAdmin which is accessible at http://localhost:10081/phpmyadmin

Symfony
My next step was to setup Apache to play nice with Symfony. Having symfony already installed, I simply added a server-wide configuration alias so CSS and javascript files are accessible:

 Alias /sf /usr/local/php/symfony12/data/web/

Configuring Virtual Hosts

I then added a few virtual hosts and found myself with a series of forbidden access problems. After trial and error and searching over the web, I found that Apache denies all access outside the default DocumentRoot. This is an easy fix, I located this configuration section for Directory / in httpd.conf and corrected the necessary lines:

Options +FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order deny,allow
Allow from 127.0.0.1
#    Deny from all

After saving, I restarted Apache with:

sudo /usr/local/zend/bin/apachectl restart

Conclusion
In summary, Zend Server CE for Mac OS X developers is a must have. All software (including a copy of Zend Framework) is up to date, no need to compile PHP for most uses, so you are up and running in no time and ready to code right away.