Upgrade to PHP 5.4 on MAC and remove version 5.3.10

Question

I would tring to update my php version to the version 5.4.

When I'm looking via /usr/local/bin/php -v in the console I see the version 5.4.3 and with php -v it tell me there is the version 5.3.10 installed.

How can I remove the older version?

Answer 1

Update: As of early 2014, you are probably better of installing from http://php-osx.liip.ch/ builds as it contains most extensions. In case you really do need to compile your own, follow the original answer.

Original answer:

Mac comes with a preinstalled php you can easily overwrite.

This is a list of steps I take to update the php I have installed:

Prerequisites:

• Xcode and it's Command line utilities (install form preferences) will give you a gcc compiler to build the php with
• libjpeg, libpng etc. if you want to build with these.

Building and installing php:

• Download the distribution from www.php.net/downloads.php
• Untar the archive and point your console into the location
• Now, having still the original old php installed, run php -i | head in the console. What you want is to configure your new php with these flags to ensure you have proper pcre support and everything works just fine.
• In the php source directory you untarred, run the ./configure script with the flags you just got
• Build php by running make and sudo make install afterwards. That will actually replace the original php distributed with OS X.

And dont forget to run make test...

Ex.: my workflow for building php

wget http://url_to/php_source.tar.gz
tar -zxvf php_source.tar.gz
cd php_source/
php -i | head
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-snmp # ... same flags as previous build
make
sudo make install