QUESTION :
I am trying to reproduce the file structure of my VPS on my mac locally, so that it’s easier for me to test websites in a local development environment
to do this I would need have a /home folder at the root level of the hard drive
using panic transmit I can see that there is already a volume called home at the root level
can I store other files and folders in here to set up my local web server?
sorry if this is a dumb question folks
ANSWER :
Unless your VPS is also running Mac OS X, you’re better off running a virtual machine of your VPS’s OS (linux?) under VirtualBox, VMWare or Parallels.
Another solution would be to put machine specific configuration information in a separate configuration file so that the machine-dependent information is separate from the rest of your code base.
Why does the home folder need to be at the root level of your hard drive? Just put it in a convenient place (e.g. ~/Sites) and set the Document Root in MAMP (under the Apache tab in the Preferences sheet) to this folder. Now, if you navigate to the root of your website (usually http://localhost:8888/ in MAMP), the contents of this folder will be displayed.