You can simplify the setup of your Apache and PHP environment by using WAMP (http://www.wampserver.com/en/) or XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html). Both options make it incredibly easy for you to get Apache and PHP set up with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Git is available for every operating system. To install Git for Windows, navigate to Git's homepage (http://git-scm.com/), and click on the Windows icon.

You can find more information on installing CouchDB for Windows using Apache's helpful install pages here: http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Installing_on_Windows.

apt-get is a powerful tool that we'll use to install applications and utilities in your system. Let's start by making sure that apt-get is up-to-date, by running the following command:

sudo apt-get update 

Let's make sure that we can host our PHP pages by installing Apache:

sudo apt-get install apache2 

Now that we have Apache, let's install PHP and a few other components needed to run the code in this book:

sudo apt-get install php5 php5-dev libapache2-mod-php5 php5-curl php5-mcrypt 

We have everything that is needed to host websites. So, let's restart Apache in order for our changes to take effect:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart 

We'll use Git for source control; luckily installing it is incredibly easy with the help of our friend, apt-git. Install Git by running the following command:

sudo apt-get install git-core 

CouchDB is the database that we'll use through the course of this book. In this section, we'll install and start it using the command line.

That was pretty easy, right? If you are using another Linux distribution, then you might have to do some research on how to get all of the required applications and tools installed.

Now that we got that out of the way, let's discuss the setup of a web development environment for Mac OS X.