Downgrade (or upgrade) PHP on OSX

OSX Yosemite comes with PHP 5.5. OSX Mountain Lion comes with PHP 5.3. What if you wanted to run PHP 5.4 on both? Well, you can, with a dead simple installation;

Shell commandcurl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.4
will install PHP 5.4.

Thanks to The coolest guide on the planet.

[EDIT: nov 6 2017: fixed dead link, added troubleshooting steps below]

Still not seeing the new version?

  1. The command above should install the old PHP 5 in /usr/local/php5 (which should be user-writable) and also write a new config file in /etc/apache2/other/+php-osx.conf, so please check and see if both exist.
    If you installed PHP 7.x, the folder is /usr/local/php7, of course.
  2. Run apachectl -t -D DUMP_INCLUDES and check if the new config file is loaded (should be /etc/apache2/other/+php-osx.conf)
  3. Try apachectl configtest and see if any errors occurred

If you can’t get it to work, try alternate methods, like using the even older series of posts on How to set-up and maintain a development environment on osx, OR (even better!) use Local by Flywheel.

Author: Remon Pel

WebDeveloper though not WebDesigner

4 thoughts on “Downgrade (or upgrade) PHP on OSX”

  1. After I used this command and restarting apache my web pages still reported PHP Version 7.1.7 was in use (High Sierra, OSX).

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