Q:

Best PHP Webserver for Development

I'm starting to work with PHP more these days and I've been wondering what the best PHP webserver might be for a dev environment. Ideally, it would be easy to build, live only in the project deps directory and be easy to configure. Also, decent performance would be a plus. 
In python land, werkzeug would be an equivalent of the type of server I'm thinking of. 

A:

In my opinion, the best webserver for the dev environment is as close as you can come to exactly the webserver in production. PHP is a lot less 'stand-alone' in some cases then Python, and it prevents nasty errors and surprises when pushing code to the production server. All kinds of havoc can ensue when a $_SERVER array is just that essential bit different, or something runs as (fast)cgi instead of as a module.

