Drupal dev env sans MAMP... almost

nother day, another blip on the learning curve. Today I attempt to set up a local hosting environment without using MAMP. Unfortunately, it looks like the doc regarding this manual set up is from 2008, five years and several OS updates out of date, which means I'm winging it, finding new directory paths, etc. At some point later on I may spend some time updating the documentation for all this, but not until I have a full grasp myself.

I'm going to start back here with requirements again, while looking at the manual setup of MySQL and PHP mentioned above. So I'm also looking at this manual setup blog post over here, which should at least point me in the right directions. Managing databases from cli (command line) is not really what I wanted to be doing here.

1. Apache server. Got it, version 2.2.22. Comes with OS X, all I have to do is turn on web sharing... which I seem to have left running and should probably turn off more often. Configuration is in httpd.conf. It's apparently very debatable just which httpd.conf file I should be working on, or whether I should use a separate file like username.conf. Either way, they are here: /etc/apache2/httpd.conf or /etc/apache2/users/username.conf This part I did previously with /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/original.
• Question: what exactly is this /etc/ directory? Heck, what are all these invisible directories? I really don't know how the system works that well, and Mac OS obscures all the useful things from the average user (eg not me, who somehow permanently turned on "show invisibles." Wish I remembered how...)
2. MySQL: downloaded, install... fix socket? can't find mysql.sock? Oh, initialize grant tables, maybe that's what I'm missing. Need mysql user? Checking that with dscl. Find proper PATH for bash profile, think I got that. Also checking info on MySQL site here for security and initial setup. And here to get mysql OS user account set up? But then that's outdated too, and the data directory is actually /usr/local/mysql/data. And I can't get mysqld_safe to work either. Ok, permissions are wrong on my error log? checked using shell> ls -la /usr/local/mysql/var, but it still says permission denied. And I need a mysql connection extension thing? mysqli? GAH. Alright, I give up. I can connect via cli to MySQL if I turn it on in the prefpane. Not a clue about that extension though. 
3. Attempted to use Homebrew, but it turns out that it needs XCode, which is only OS X 10.7.4+ and I'm on 10.6 something. At this point, I would like to upgrade, but, more software costs...

Then checked back on the original issue I was following that was messing up MAMP, and it seems there's a patch that fixes the issue, so provided that works, I'm back to figuring out more of Git, rerolling, and possibly creating patches. All of which is really not that difficult, but these background headaches are pretty killer.

And I got my Drupal install page back up, just had to reset my MAMP port to 80. And thank goodness, configuration goes smoothly, no more errors. So the lesson here is that I need a backup server/db environment and more knowledge of how to configure the whole shebang. I'll work on finishing that setup some time when it will be a challenge and not a headache. 

Now on to more patches! yay!