These are instructions for how to install nginx (pronounced as “Engine X”, a high-performance open source web server) and PHP with FastCGI on a Mac for development purposes. I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to do this on my own, so hopefully it will save someone else a little time. For the record, I was using Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) on a white Intel Core Duo MacBook at the time of this writing. There isn’t anything terribly non-standard about my particular setup that is worth mentioning, other than a larger-than-standard hard drive and 3rd-party RAM. Obviously, none of this will work on a PC running Windows or Linux, although there are a bunch of places you can go to find out how to install nginx on other platforms. This article, however, focuses only on the Mac platform.