PHP7 installed by Homebrew doesn't work with Apache on macOS

Question

I am trying to upgrade to php7 which I installed via homebrew.

In CLI php -v returns

PHP 7.0.10 (cli) (built: Aug 21 2016 19:14:33) ( NTS ) Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies 

But for localhost, firefox pops up a problem loading page, and I can't view a localhost/phpinfo.php; if I swap the module lines out back to php5 it works fine.

Here's a pastebin http://pastebin.com/950yC7wA of my apache2/httpd.conf, I have no idea how to go about fixing this.

• osx version El Capitan 10.11

Answer 1

Make sure that:

• You've followed the instructions from brew info [email protected]:

  ==> Caveats To enable PHP in Apache add the following to httpd.conf and restart Apache:     LoadModule php7_module /usr/local/opt/[email protected]/lib/httpd/modules/libphp7.so      <FilesMatch \.php$>         SetHandler application/x-httpd-php     </FilesMatch>  Finally, check DirectoryIndex includes index.php     DirectoryIndex index.php index.html 

• You restarted Apache via sudo apachectl restart.

For step by step tutorial, see: Setup Apache, MySQL and PHP using Homebrew on macOS Sierra.

Troubleshooting

• When something doesn't work, check the logs in real-time via:

  tail -f /usr/local/var/log/apache2/*error* 

  Then start/restart the server.

  ^{Note: When finished, hit Control-C to quit tail.}

Answer 2

While Homebrew is an excellent tool, it is unnecessary at times.

I mention in my posts on Installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL on Mac OS X, OS X comes with Apache and PHP pre-installed. As such, you simply have to configure and enable them.

Unfortunately, as of Mac OS 10.11 (El Capitan), the PHP version is still 5.5. I imagine this will change with 10.12 (Sierra) since PHP 5.5 is EOL. However, it may only be PHP 5.6.

For installing PHP 7, I recommend using PHP OSX. They offer package installs for PHP versions 5.3 to 7.1 (latest). It's available for Mac OS 10.6+ (Snow Leopard).

Since it is a package install, it works out of the box with the default Apache install. You'll only need to update your PATH and modify their PHP ini file. Both of which are outlined in their FAQ.

If you want a more step by step tutorial, check out my recent post on Updating PHP on Mac OS X.