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Upgrade Php Version MacOS

April 3, 2020 by Areg Sarkissian

Use Homebrew MacOS package manager to upgrade the default php version to the latest php version.

First update homebrew to latest version

brew update

Then upgrade PHP to the latest version

brew upgrade php

Make sure to source your bash profile or relaunch the terminal for the update to the $PATH variable to take effect.

Sourcing the bash profile

source ~/.profile

Note: The reason we need to source the bash profile is to ensure the $PATH variable has the /usr/local/bin path before the /usr/bin path. This is because the symlink to the current php version is in /usr/local/bin which needs to override the default macOS installed PHP version symlink in /usr/bin

Now we can check the current PHP version

php -v

Switching current PHP version

We can switch between multiple installed PHP versions globally

Assuming we have both php@7.4 and php@7.3 installed and assuming the current version of php is set to php@7.4, we can switch to php@7.3 like so:

brew unlink php && brew link --force --overwrite php@7.3

Note: this unlinks the php symlink located at usr/local/bin/php that is currently pointing to the php@7.4 version located at /usr/local/Cellar/php/7.4.4/bin to point to the php@7.3 version located at /usr/local/Cellar/php/7.3.5/bin

To switch back simply change the version number in the command:

brew unlink php && brew link --force --overwrite php@7.4

I added the following function to my bash profile to easily switch to a specific PHP version.

phpver() {
    brew unlink php && brew link --force --overwrite php@$1
}

Now I can simply type phpver 7.4 to set my php version to php@7.4

Install PECL libraries

Follow instructions here to add php extension libraries:

installing-homebrew-php-extensions-with-pecl