Newish to the Mac world for development. Trying to configure Apache Server (httpd) on my machine. When doing so I was told to just ignore the installed version and install the Homebrew version of httpd and then turn off installed apache. Did so, got it working but I am finding I have frequently tweak it adding a .htaccess file where I wouldn't think using the embedded version would.
In the sake of saving time and risking blowing local development up. Why would I want to use Homebrew httpd vs embedded?
I tried to Google the difference and I'm not seeing anything relevant as to why I would want one vs the other.
As a developer who has been developing on a Mac for over 15 years, I have seen many changes in the local development environment. I used to use the built in Apache that came with OS X and it was mostly fine. The biggest headache came when I would upgrade to a newer version of OS X. part of the upgrade process is usually upgrading Apache. This is all well and good except for the fact that it would make a backup of my .conf file and use a new fresh .conf file, generally causing some temporary confusion.
Using the homebrew version should help prevent at least that problem.
More importantly, a problem that you are going to run into is the whole "well it works on MY computer" problem.
It is more than likely that you will be using a linux machine to host your site to some extent when you are ready to put it out in the wild. Be that on an AWS instance, Digital Ocean, etc.
One of the things that will help you save tons of time now and in the future would be to use a Virtual Machine that is running linux locally to emulate the production server you intend for your code to live in the end.
This can sound overwhelming if you don't have any experience with VM's, but a lot of the work has been abstracted into some very easy to use and understand tools that will do most of the leg work for you.
For example Vagrant is very straight forward and mature and is used by loads of companies to handle this exact task (and free).
Some people will say "what about Docker" or some other alternatives, but in my opinion, Vagrant is more accessible and has a lower learning curve than the others.
I would suggest investing the time into learning how to set up a vagrant box as a web host over either of the proposed environments.