PEAR on macOS 10.15 Catalina

macOS no longer ships with PEAR, but installing it is quite 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).

Installing PEAR

cd /tmp
curl -s -O https://pear.php.net/install-pear-nozlib.phar
sudo php install-pear-nozlib.phar -d /usr/local/lib/php -b /usr/local/bin

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 --ignore-errors

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/local/lib/php/pear to include_path (if /etc/php.ini does not exist, create it with the following content).

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

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