Can't access admin panel
I had the same issue on my mac and struggled for hours.

Having the right .htaccess file in place was key, but if you are not getting Craft's error messages, that's a sign your .htaccess file is not having any effect (you can verify this by placing some random text in there and see if you get an internal server error or not).

Making the following changes to httpd.conf made .htaccess work and solved this issue for me: 


Change from "AllowOverride None" to AllowOverride All" in the
document root directory block
Uncomment LoadModule rewrite_module...


I hope this helps someone solve this quicker than I did.