Why must people deviate from proper standards?
Installing WordPress on a Mac caused me some grief simply because telling PHP to connect to the database at localhost didn’t work. Who would have thought that localhost couldn’t be resolved? I was saved because Beth was ironing my “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1” T-shirt, prompting me to give it a go.
OS X also does something culpable with the “local” domain, using it for rendezvous or something (it’s been a while since it troubled me).
I’m pretty sure this nonsense has consumed and made worse quite a few hours of my life. I wonder what the cost is globally?
Anyway, bottom line, use 127.0.0.1 in Mac configurations if stuff doesn’t work, particularly if you are installing WordPress and by implication PHP or MySQL.