After setting up a local web development environment with XAMPP for MacOS, you should still secure your installation, even if you're the only one working on your computer.

XAMPP  is a popular open-source software stack that provides a development environment for web applications and is completely free. The XAMPP open source package has been set up to be incredibly easy to install and to use. It includes an Apache web server containing MySQL or MariaDB and PHP (including Perl), which is the stack you primarily need for web development.

There are multiple ways to update your Drupal 8 installation but I prefer using composer for ease of use. However, if you have multiple PHP installations on your system, composer may use the wrong PHP version. Typically, you would update your Drupal 8 installation like this:

When making changes in your httpd-vhost.conf file, make sure to test it before reloading the apache config file or restarting apache.

Mac OSX

apachectl configtest

XAMPP OSX

/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/bin/apachectl configtest

Errors should display, if there are any, otherwise you'll see the Syntax OK to indicate that there are no errors and you can reload the apache config file or restart apache.