install-php-mac

Installing PHP On MacOS

MacOS environments are setup a little differently than Windows. We will be using Homebrew to install PHP and MySQL. Homebrew is a package manager for MacOS and Linux. It makes it easy to install and update software. For now, we are just going to install PHP. We will setup our MySQL database later on.

We will also be using the development server that comes with PHP. This is a built in web server that we can use to serve our PHP files locally. This is not meant for production, but it is great for development. We will be using this for the entire course.

If you're on Windows, you can move to the next lesson and I will show you how to get setup on Windows with a tool called Laragon.

To install Homebrew, run the following command in the terminal:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Now you can install stuff with the following command:

brew install <package>

Let's install PHP with Homebrew:

brew install php

This will install PHP and all of it's dependencies. It may take a while. When complete, you can check the version of PHP that you have installed by running the following command:

php -v

You should see something like this:

PHP 8.2.7 (cli) (built: Jun 20 2023 20:51:18) (NTS)

You should have at least version 8.0.0 installed. If you don't, you can update it with the following command:

brew upgrade php

If you used Laragon on Windows, you will have a specific folder for your projects. Be sure to watch that setup video. If you used Homebrew on Mac, you can set your projects folder to whatever you want, but I will be using ~/Projects for this course. In that, I will create a test-project folder with an index.php file. You can do this with the following commands:

mkdir ~/Projects
cd ~/Projects
mkdir test-project
touch index.php

Open the test-project folder in VS Code. You can do this by running the following command:

code ~/Projects/test-project

Add the following code:

<?php
 echo 'Hello World!';

Now we can run this file in the terminal with the following command from the test-project folder:

php index.php

However, this is not the best way to run PHP. We want to run it in a web server. We can do this with the following command:

php -S localhost:8000

The root of your project will be where you ran the command from. Since I ran the command in the test-project folder, that will be the root. Now you can open your browser and go to http://localhost:8000 and you should see the output of the index.php file. Now we are ready to go as far as serving our PHP files locally.