Installing PHP using Homebrew on MAC

After installing PHP with brew,

brew install [email protected]

or any version you need(could be: [email protected])

run this command to ensure you have PHP installed: brew list | grep php then you need to manually add an alias as follows:

alias php='/usr/local/Cellar/[email protected]/7.3.13/bin/php'

Then, for the change to take effect you need to refresh your terminal. You can use: source ~/.bash_profile command, or close and open terminal.

Update

In February 2018, the php72 formula (the current version of PHP at that time) has been moved into the core Homebrew tap and renamed as php.

The homebrew/php tap has been deprecated in January 2018 and then archived on March 31, 2018. The formulas it contained are not available any more.

Since February 2018, installing PHP using Homebrew is as easy as:

$ brew install php

The older PHP versions that are still maintained can be installed using the new @ convention for versions (PHP 7.1 is [email protected]).

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The original answer (not usable any more)

The PHP ecosystem lives in the homebrew/php tap. You can find there six versions of the interpreter (from 5.3 to 7.1), extensions for them and some PHP-related tools.

In order to install PHP you have to install the homebrew/php tap first (this is needed only once):

$ brew tap homebrew/php
$ brew install php70

Or you can do both operations in a single step by running:

$ brew install homebrew/php/php70

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You could discover all these by searching php first:

$ brew search php

I ran into this error in 2021 using Mac OS Big Sur. Running the below commands helped me out

1. rm -rf $(brew --repo homebrew/core)
2. brew tap homebrew/core
3. brew install php

Link to source