PEAR on OS X 10.9 Mavericks

Like previous versions of OS X, 10.9 also ships with PEAR. Installing and activating it is easy. Once that’s done PEAR and PECL work as expected (if you also want to set up and install Apache, PHP and MySQL, check this post).

Updated instructions for OS X 10.10 Yosemite are available here.

Installing PEAR

cd /usr/lib/php
sudo php install-pear-nozlib.phar

If that fails

autoconf may be missing. To install it just use Homebrew. Once Homebrew is installed, installing autoconf is as simple as:

brew install autoconf

After autoconf is installed, try running the pear installer above again.

Upgrade PEAR

sudo pear channel-update pear.php.net
sudo pecl channel-update pecl.php.net
sudo pear upgrade-all

Xcode Command Line Developer Tools

You will run into problems installing pecl extensions, if you don’t have the Xcode Command Line Extensions installed, so we’ll also install them.

xcode-select --install

Configuring PHP

Open /etc/php.ini and add .:/usr/lib/php/pear to include_path (if /etc/php.ini does not exist, create it with the following content).

include_path = ".:/usr/lib/php/pear"

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