If you need to verify that your iOS apps are sending and receiving the appropriate data, or if you want to make sure your favorite apps are not uploading your personal information to their servers without your consent, I recommend Charles. Follow these steps and you’ll be up and running in no time.

After following many outdated and incomplete instructions for setting up a web development environment on a Mac, and spending a lot of time finding solutions to the problems I encountered along the way, I decided to put together detailed tutorials for both Snow Leopard and Lion.

I started with a clean system, and the following are the steps that worked for me. If you run into an issue, or find an error in this tutorial, please let me know and I’ll update it.