Where is PHP.ini in Mac OS X Lion?

Question

To locate the ini file on your machine, open Terminal.app and run the following command:

php --ini

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If you need a template for Lion, try this.

You should find it in /private/etc if it exists, otherwise:

sudo cp /private/etc/php.ini.default /private/etc/php.ini

In terminal do php -i | grep php.ini. Should give you some clues ;)

Answers from @Cronk and @Justin got me close on Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. In fact, on my system the /etc/php.ini file was missing completely, and it wasn't until I ran phpinfo() on the web server that I observed there was no configuration file. Copying the file from /etc/php.ini.default and adding the fully qualified path to the mcrypt.so library to the config file solved the problem:

cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini

Then in /etc/php.ini add the following line (using the correct path to your mcrypt.so file):

extension="/usr/local/Cellar/php54-mcrypt/5.4.29/mcrypt.so"

Then restart Apache2:

apachectl restart

As pointed out, the php --ini command will tell you where PHP is expecting to find the php.ini file.

For a standard installation, it's likely to be looking for /etc/php.ini

If you've used macports then PHP may be looking for /opt/local/etc/php5/php.ini

Run phpinfo() from any file and it tells you where it is. Here is a screenshot.