Migrate your local PHP 7.2 setup to Homebrew v1.5

Last week, Hans Puac, a colleague of mine, wrote a small guide into our internal company chat on how to migrate your local PHP environment on macOS to the new Homebrew version 1.5.*. The guide helped a lot of other engineers inside trivago.

I thought it might help more people from the internet. I asked Hans if I am allowed to share it, and he approved. So kudos belongs to him.

Here we go:

With Homebrew v1.5.0 the tap homebrew/php got deprecated. They migrated it to homebrew/core, but this is changing the installation process completely. If you want to migrate:

1. Cleanup

Remove your currently installed PHP packages. This is not 100% necessary, but I wanted to have it clean.

You can check what packages are installed via brew list | grep php, for example, and remove via brew remove MYPACKAGE. Check for leftovers in /usr/local/etc/php/ and remove if necessary. Untap the deprecated repo brew untap homebrew/php. You can check your taps with brew tap. I also had some other taps that I directly untapped as well because those were deprecated:

$ brew untap homebrew/science
$ brew untap homebrew/versions

2. Update

$ brew update

3. Install PHP

Install PHP via

$ brew install php@7.2

4. Verify Installation

Before we continue, we want to ensure that the

• PHP installation was successful
• PATH is set properly
• PEAR is configured properly

Run php --version, php --ini and pear config-show | grep php.ini and check if everything is pointing to the right PHP version and that no warnings are displayed.

If you encounter any problems, check the Troubleshooting section below.

5. Install Extensions

The intl is now already built-in. Install all other required extensions via PECL (gets installed together with PHP).

Installation via pecl requires autoconf (brew install autoconf):

pecl install xdebug
pecl install redis
pecl install apcu
pecl install memcached
pecl install imagick

Particular version of an extension

If your app depends on a particular version of an extension, e.g. redis in v3.1.6 specify the version explicitly via pecl install redis-3.1.6.

Extension snmp

If you rely on the SNMP Extension, I have to disappoint you right now. This extension is, state of now (2018-04-10), not part of this PHP build:

SNMP was excluded from the build because it crashes Apache.

6. Cleanup

To make some disk space accessible, you may remove old versions of packages by executing brew cleanup -s.

Troubleshooting

Wrong PHP Version is displayed

If php --version displays the wrong PHP version, try to open a new terminal window. The PATH variable got adjusted during the PHP installation and might not be loaded in your current terminal session.

If the old version is still displayed, check your PATH (echo $PATH) and ensure that /usr/local/bin/ comes before /usr/bin/ or uninstall the other PHP version if the PATH was already set properly. The commands ls -la $(which php) and brew list | grep php might help you find out where that version is coming from.

PEAR configuration is pointing to the wrong php.ini file

If pear config-show | grep php.ini is pointing to the wrong php.ini file, you can overwrite it with pear config-set php_ini /MY/RIGHT/PATH/php.ini. You can find out the right path with php --ini.

Module already loaded / Unable to load library

Example Warnings:

• PHP Warning: Module '[some module]' already loaded in Unknown on line 0
• PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '[some module]' ([...]) in Unknown on line 0

During the installation of an extension, pecl adds the extension to the php.ini file but not removing it during uninstall. In this case, edit your php.ini manually and remove deprecated extension="[some module]" lines.

Resources

• Homebrew 1.5.0 release announcement
• PHP load and tap errors with latest brew @ brew discourse