#You should do all your LAMP development in a Virtual Machine
##Here's Why:
Many of us develop on Macintoshes. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that it's based on a Unix platform of some sort. This allows us to run common server software such as Apache, Ruby, Python and Nodejs on our Macs.
Our computers become powerful develoment machines similar to the servers our apps will eventually live on.
Sometime we start our computer only to find Apache won't start, or MySQL can't create a PID file, or we've updated to Mountain Lion and Apache needs to be reconfigured. Death!