I had a number of issues regarding my local development VirtualBox loaded ubuntu that I installed a few years back. Using a VirtualBox installed Ubuntu for development

Getting frustrated of trying to fix the problem (which I couldent really identify) I upgraded and updated and changed loads of stuff in the Ubuntu installation. Nothing worked.

As all my actual work is in my Dropbox, I opted for removing the Development box in the VirtualBox, and look for another solution.

http://mallinson.ca/osx-web-development/
Has a nice guide for installing Homebrew, MySQL, and use the apache2.4 and PHP delivered by OSX (yosemite)
Im just running my sites off the subdirectories in the Dropbox folder, so I skipped the dnsmasq part of that guide.

This is a LOCAL development machine, so I dont have many security conserns, this allows me to skip some fears and modify where I need.
To be able to use the Dropbox folder in apache on the Mac, I had to change the user and group for the http deamon, to my mac user:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
default is _www for both user and group, but I changed it to emil/staff

Also, creating a “username.conf” in the directory:
cd /private/etc/apache2/users
sudo vi emil.conf

inserting

Thirdly, changing
sudo vi /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

From

To

and remember to restart the apache server to effectuate changes:
sudo apachectl restart

While trying to setup the dropbox folder as the source for my local development, I already described the solutions above, however I did run into some permission issues, and threads like these helped me get it right:
No permission to access / on this server
– And including your username as the webserver deamon executer No permission to access /~username/