Of course once you go into production you’ll probably going to have to deal with Apache’s nf file anyway so you might as well front load the pain now and be better prepared when things actually do go into production. 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.
While it’s nice to be able to customize XAMPs Apache installation getting the configuration right can take some time.
Instead of dealing with a GUI one deals with the Apache configuration files directly. XAMP is another free AMP stack which includes an editable nf file making configuring Apache to test SSL connections much more standardized if not straight forward. One thing lacking in MAMP though is an actual nf file like you probably deal with on a production server. MAMP is useful for getting Apache, PHP, and MySQL stack up and working together quickly on a mac. I had been using the free version of MAMP for awhile but found the free version too limited. I recently retooled a Zend development environment on a mac laptop running OS X.
