title: How do I troubleshoot local php and RoR dev environments on mac osx? RoR sites are not working
body: <p>I have run into problems getting my local php and rails development environments to play nicely with each other on OSX 10.7.</p>
  
  <p>Developing is a hobby, and I am a total noob. I use MAMP for developing in PHP. A few months a ago I decided to give RoR a whirl, and set up a dev environment using Passenger.</p>
  
  <p>A couple of weeks ago I reinstalled MAMP when I noticed I could not access the MAMP sites.</p>
  
  <p>Now I can't access the RoR sites. I've tried reinstalling Passenger. I still get the error "Oops! Google Chrome could not find app.local" when I type the local URL. If I navigate to localhost, I get an "It Works!" page, so something is being served.</p>
  
  <p>I have experimented with Pow. The server seems to work if I navigate to localhost, but when I go to the app I get a rake not found error. Strange, as all the gems worked under Passenger. I've since uninstalled Pow.</p>
  
  <p>So I have three questions. </p>
  
  <p>1) How do I troubleshoot my setup to find out what is going wrong? I'm guessing it is an issue with the Apache server (though I could be very wrong). Where should I look for log files to help resolve this?</p>
  
  <p>2) What is the best way to set up a local dev environment so that I can switch easily between RoR and PHP? (I know that virtualization is an option, but would prefer not to go down this route, unless there is a very good reason to).</p>
  
  <p>3) Can anyone recommend a good guide or source of info for beginners on setting up dev environments? I have read a lot of different things online, but need to get a better grasp of the basics - i.e., understanding where gem files etc are being installed, proper use of bash files, macports vs homebrew, passenger vs pow etc.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for taking the time to help a frustrated beginner.</p>
  
  <p>Andy</p>