PHP 5.3 on OSX

February 22nd, 2010

I wanted to play with Symfony 2 and so needed to install PHP 5.3 on my OSX 10.5. What seemed like a simple task turned into a huge waste of my time.

I use MAMP because it's a nice out-of-the-box solution. The problem is, it still doesn't ship with 5.3 because it's waiting for it to be "stable".

It's funny that I got a similar answer a few years ago from a big web hosting company about PHP5 when it was clearly announced that PHP4 is discontinued.

I first searched for a way to upgrade PHP in MAMP and came across this nice post: http://www.davidgolding.net/cakephp/upgrading-php-in-mamp.html

Unfortunately, while following the steps, I kept getting errors because some dependencies were missing. First openssl, then libjpeg, and so on. After some time I grew tired of that catch-up game and decided to go with a product that comes with 5.3 pre-compiled.

XAMPP was my answer. You can download it here: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

So if you're tired of MAMP, it's time to switch.

EDIT:

To migrate your vhost config from MAMP, copy  to XAMPP/etc/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and enable the line that contains this path in XAMPP/etc/httpd.conf

To migrate your MySQL, my favorite method is to enable MySQL via MAMP, dump all the databases to a file (you may use MySQL Administrator for convenience), disabling MySQL via MAMP, enabling it via XAMPP and then restore your databases from the dump file.

EDIT 2:

At the time of this post, XAMPP ships with PHP 5.3.0 while Symfony 2 requires 5.3.1. Oh well, I guess I'll just wait for them to release a new version before I play with Symfony.

Previous: Building a conference website Next: ConFoo – Episode 1 (youtube)