How to compile PHP as a static binary on MacOS?

Question

I'm attempting to compile PHP from source on MacOS. I'm using the --enable-static configure option to build static libraries like this:

./configure --enable-static --disable-all
make

While this produces a working binary, if I inspect the binary with otool I can see that it's using two shared libraries, libresolv.9.dylib and libSystem.B.dylib:

$ otool -L sapi/cli/php   
sapi/cli/php:
    /usr/lib/libresolv.9.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
    /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1252.250.1)

Is there any way to statically link these libraries?

Answer 1

After researching this it sounds like it isn't possible or desirable to statically link libresolv and libSystem.

libSystem contains libc among other libraries. libresolv contains DNS functions such as res_init. Both are provided by MacOS. MacOS does not support static binaries.

Since these libraries are always available on MacOS it's ok to use them as a shared library.

If you need to support older versions of MacOS you can use the -mmacosx-version-min linker flag:

LDFLAGS="-mmacosx-version-min=10.7" ./configure --enable-static --disable-all
LDFLAGS="-mmacosx-version-min=10.7" make

You can confirm it worked by using otool -l and checking for LC_VERSION_MIN_MACOSX.